Flood

Flood papers alert 2023

Adina Moraru (WP2) researches flood risk in mountain rivers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Flooding has taken a toll in European countries during summer 2023, highlighting the relevance of expanding what we know about floods and how we manage rivers. Adina has published two journal papers on this topic earlier this month:

Paper 1: what makes some rivers more vulnerable to flooding than others?

European rivers suffer significant erosion during flooding (©Ruiz-Villanueva et al., 2023)

Ruiz-Villanueva, V., Piegay, H., Scorpio, V., Bachmann, A., Brousse, G., Cavalli, M., Comiti, F., Crema, S., Fernandez, E., Furdada, G., Hajdukiewicz, H., Hunzinger, L., Lucia, A., Marchi, L., Moraru, A., Piton, G., Rickenmann, D., Righini, M., Surian, N., Yassine, R., Wyzga, B. (2023). River widening in mountain and foothill areas during floods: Insights from a meta-analysis of 51 European Rivers, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 903, 166103, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.166103

Paper 2: how can we obtain quicker flood data to monitor and manage rivers?

Comparison of flood simulations with flood observations (©Moraru et al., 2023)

Moraru, A., Rüther, N., Bruland, O. (2023). Investigating optimal 2D hydrodynamic modeling of a recent flash flood in a steep Norwegian river using high-performance computing. Journal of Hydroinformatics, 25(5), 1690-1712. https://doi.org/10.2166/hydro.2023.012

WoWW

Highlights EGU23 – OSPP award nomination

Adina Moraru (WP2) attended EGU23 in Vienna earlier this year. The event was very fruitful, she got to interact and catch up over social events, gave a scientific presentation, and got to meet other IAG networks (Italy, Germany, UK, among others) and committee representatives in her role of Norwegian Young Geomorphologists’ National Representative for GeoNorth (see photo gallery below). She attended the EGU23 congress thanks to a generous travel grant by the Norwegian Hydrological Council.

Adina was paired as a mentee with Assoc. Prof. Maria Ansine Jensen (University Centre in Svalbard, Norway) as a mentor in the EGU23 mentorship programme (lower left photo).

Adina’s presentation was nominated for the Outstanding Student and PhD Presentation award.

Additionally, Adina brainstormed potential collaborations with other IAG young geomorphologists networks and planned future events (e.g. she was invited as a member of the scientific committee of the upcoming X Italian Young Geomorphologists’ Day and III IAG International Young Geomorphologists’ Meeting). She was also invited to international cooperation with the University of Turku (Finland) and GeoFieldLab (Norway).

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[Coming soon] EGU General Assembly 2023

The General Assembly for the European Geosciences Union is held from the 23rd to the 28th of April in Vienna (Austria) and online. Adina Moraru (WP2) will attend as the Norwegian Young Geomorphologists National Representatives for GeoNorth (IAG) as well as present her latest research.

Adina’s attendance to EGU23 is supported by a generous travel grant by the Norwegian Hydrological Council.

Adina will present the “Reconstruction and optimal modelling of a flash flood in a steep Norwegian river using remotely sensed- and in-situ data“, within the session on remote sensing for flood dynamics monitoring and flood mapping. Adina’s session will take place on Thursday 27 Apr, from 10:45–12:30 (CEST) in Hall A, although her poster will be on display the whole day (from 08:00 until 19:00 CEST).

Her poster is based on two of her recent journal publications:

Additionally, Adina will take part in the mentorship programme the European Geosciences Union is launching this year. As a first time attendee, she will be assigned to a mentor during the congress, which will help her navigate a very intensive congress (ca. 20,000 presentations expected).

You may find more interesting research on EGU’s website. The content will be available virtually from the 20th of March to the 20th of May 2023.

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3rd IAHR Young Professionals congress

The International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) has hosted its third Young Professionals congress from the 28th November to the 2nd December 2022. The congress aimed to encourage networking and mentorship for young researchers in fields such as Fluvial Hydraulics, Hydroinformatics, Flood Risk Management or Sediment Transport, Experimental Methods and Instrumentations, among others. The event was held virtually and gathered over 1,300 attendees.

Adina took part in the congress and presented her most recent findings in the form of an extended abstract and poster in the Flood Risk Management session, chaired by Susanna Dazzi (University of Parma, Italy) and Ravindra Vitthal Kale (National Institute of Hydrology Roorkee, India), and moderated by David Ferras (IHE-Delft, the Netherlands) and Ingrid Silva (Sweco, Sweden). The presentation and following Q&A were recorded by the congress organizing committee and will available soon.

Panelists, chairs and moderators during the Flood Risk Management session (© A. Moraru)

Adina presented her most recent research on “The role of soft data to understand flood dynamics in an ephemeral mountain river“, where she highlighed the hydro-morphological information provided by photographs, videos, media coverage and witness testimonies during the 2017 flash flood in Utvik (western Norway), complementary to remote sensing techniques. The dataset she provides can be used for model calibration, validation, as well as to improve flood early warning systems. Further research on this topic is available in the award-winning journal article Moraru et al. (2021).

Poster presented by Adina during the Flood Risk Management session (© A. Moraru)
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39th IAHR World Congress (Granada, Spain)

The 39th World Congress organized by the International Association for Hydro-Environmental Research (IAHR) was held last week in Granada (south Spain; see figure below, left). Adina Moraru (work package 2) has attended this biennial congress that included 98 oral regular sessions, 15 special sessions, 4 high-level panels, 8 technical visits, hundreds of posters on display (see figure below, right) several side events, workshops and master classes.

  • (© IAHR)
  • (© IAHR)

The week was packed with meetings of different IAHR committees and special sessions. Adina attended the so-called “Institutes Meeting”, a networking-oriented side event (see upper three photographs below) where several public and private research instutions were invited to present their research and diversity (upper-left: Ana Adeva-Bustos from SINTEF, Norway, upper-center: Cristina Anacabe from IHE-Delft, the Netherlands). Tom Soo, the executive director for IAHR attended the meeting (upper-right photograph) and initiated a brainstorm for future events. Another interesting special session was the “Review of the IAHR Green Paper: Towards practical flood assessment for development projects“, coordinated by Stefan Haun (head of the Hydraulic Lab. at University of Stuttgart, Germany; lower photograph below) with Alastair Barnett (HYDRA Software, New Zealand; lower photograph below) and James Ball (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) as authors of the paper and invited speakers.

  • (© Adina Moraru)
  • (© Adina Moraru)
  • (© Adina Moraru)
  • (© Adina Moraru)

The breaks and late evenings were reserved for networking events especially oriented to early careers. For instance, the John F. Kennedy Student Paper Competition held (see list of finalists in upper-left and upper-center figures below) before the Young Professionals Assembly and Young Professionals Night (upper-right photograph portraits some of the attendees to the latter networking event crossing Genil river). Adina (lower photograph, second from right to left in back row), as co-founder and president of IAHR Scandinavia Young Professionals Network (founded in late 2020), got a VIP invitation to the Young Professionals Night. During the evening, a Kahoot competition was arranged by the local YPN, IAHR Spain YPN, and prizes were handed to the winners (lower photograph: the 1st prize was handed to Markus Bähner, a friendly master student from TUM in Germany).

  • (© Adina Moraru)
  • (© IAHR)

The oral presentations were grouped in themes, and Adina attended the ones focused on Computational and Experimental Methods and, of course, Extreme Events: from Droughts to Floods (see photographs below). Some highlights of these thematic sessions were presentations on the use of numerical models to investigate intermittent streams, i.e. small rivers that do not always contain flowing water, under increasingly pressing climate change conditions (left-hand figure: Prof. Michael Tritthart from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences BOKU, Vienna, Austria) or the recently developed drought prevention and management toolbox by the United Nations in collaboration with DHI (right-hand figure; UN Environment Programme-DHI Centre), which is supported by an openly available database and uses specific indicators to build an early warning system for droughts. The latter is very related to Adina‘s previous work on indicators controlling river channel erosion during flash floods (conference paper), as well as on the identification of critical points in steep rivers using numerical modelling (conference paper) for a better and faster flood modelling. She went home very pleased and excited!

  • (© Adina Moraru)
  • (© Adina Moraru)

Finally, the Congress Gala (upper-left and lower-center photographs) and Closing Ceremony ended the 39th IAHR World Congress. The Congress Gala was held at the Parque de las Ciencias, where they carry out scientific dissemination, and a delightful flamenco show entertained the attendees (upper-left photograph). So what’s next? The Young Professionals Assembly held earlier in the week brought up forthcoming activities for early careers (upper-right photograph), and several YPNs will arrange these activities to help their members learn and network. Some of the IAHR Scandinavia Young Professionals Network board attended these events (lower-center, from left to right: Slaven Conevski, co-founder and secretary for IAHR Scandinavia YPN, and Adina Moraru, co-founder and president for IAHR Scandinavia YPN) and will take part in future initiatives. Although this congress is held biennially, as the 39th IAHR World Congress was delayed 1 year due to the pandemic, the 40th IAHR World Congress will take place in August 2023 in Vienna, Austria, right in schedule.

  • (© Adina Moraru)
  • (© Adina Moraru)
From left to right: Slaven Conevski (Secretary for IAHR Scandinavia YPN), Adina Moraru (president for IAHR Scandinavia YPN), Théo Dezert (posdoc at NTNU) & Geir Helge Kiplesund (PhD candidate at NTNU)
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NTNU Digital Transformation seminar 2022

Every year since NTNU’s Digital Transformation initiative started in 2018, WoWW (as one of the 9 projects funded by this initiative) is invited to present its latest results. WoWW’s presentation followed directly after the event was introduced by director for NTNU Digital, John Krogstie (see image below). With some of the WoWW members spread across the country due to exchanges, our presentation was partly in Trondheim and partly remote.

John Krogstie, director for NTNU Digital, introduces the seminar (©Adina Moraru)

Oddbjørn Bruland, project leader for World of Wild Waters and team leader for work package 2 (see image below) — creating hydrologic and hydraulic models of flash floods —, introduced the project presentation with an impacting question for the audience: “Is it safe where you live?” followed by an animation of a 2D hydraulic simulation of the flash flood that severely damaged his hometown in 2017 (the case was widely covered by different news outlets, and the flood’s hydrology and hydraulics are analyzed in two of WoWW’s journal publications: Bruland (2020) and Moraru et al. (2021)). The follow-up question to this animation was “Does this scare you enough to act?“. If your answer is “no“, you need to continue reading… and watch the whole presentation in WoWW’s YouTube channel (linked below).

Oddbjørn Bruland, project leader for WoWW, presents the motivation for WoWW’s research (©Adina Moraru)
Full recording of the presentation (©Adina Moraru)

Gebray Habtu Alene, PhD candidate in work package 3 — in charge of studying flow landslides of sensitive clays, such as the devastating episode in Gjerdrum (Norway) on the 30 December 2020 — presented the integrated workflow from his numerical modelling of the quick clay landslide beforementioned (see image below) to its preparation for gamification in work package 4. This is not as straightforward as one might expect, and the team identified a significant obstacle to overcome during this workflow. I personally found it fascinating how quickly the Virtual Reality clip that Gebray shared triggered a response in the audience! Check out the video recording of the presentation above to see what I mean.

Gebray Habtu Alene, PhD candidate in work package 3, showcases the difference between scientific visualization of results and their gamification in Virtual Reality (©Adina Moraru)

Lastly, Andrew Perkis, team leader for work package 4 (see image below) — responsible for creating an immersive and interactive experience of natural hazards — concluded the project presentation by addressing the gap that WoWW has had to bridge throughout the project duration. Although research projects oftentimes encounter obstacles along the way, the gap between work packages in WoWW had little to do with research and external consultants were needed to fill the role of “the black box” that converges from numerical simulation results to graphically visualized outputs.

Andrew Perkis, team leader for work package 4, highlights the main challenges of WoWW and the Digital Transformation initiative (©Adina Moraru)

Flood

Editor’s choice awarded to flash flood journal article

Flash news! Adina Moraru and Michal Pavlíček’s (work package 2) recently published journal article has been awarded the category of “Editor’s Choice“! (see snapshot below) What article, do you mean? We wrote a post about it as soon as the manuscript came out with some of its highlights (see a sneak peek in the figure below), if you’re curious. This is an honor and great news for World of Wild Waters. Now, how does this work?

The manuscript is public and open to access here. No need to be subscribed anywhere.

“Editor’s Choice articles are based on recommendations by the scientific editors of journals from around the world, in this case Water (Switzerland). Editors select a small number of articles recently published in the journal that they believe will be particularly interesting to authors, or important in this field. The aim is to provide a snapshot of some of the most exciting work published in the various research areas of the journal.”, writes on the publishing journal’s website.

In short, this means that:

  1. The article get’s a blue-colored label (see snapshot above) that helps identify Adina and Michal’s manuscript as high quality.
  2. Also, Water (Swizterland) has a section where all the Editor’s Choice articles are collected for the readers, and this increases the likelihood that the manuscript is visited and read by the journal readers.
  3. Last, but not least, it’s a badge of honor to receive the validation and “stamp of approval” of scientific editors, especially so early in our careers (this is Adina‘s first ever published journal manuscript).
The journal article tells the story of Storelva in Utvik (western Norway), how it flooded in 2017 and the information we got in the field and via remote sensing to understand afterwards what happened. This is the location figure in the article available here.
Flood

Flash flood depicted in new journal article

The flash flood affecting Utvik in Stryn municipality (western Norway) in summer 2017 was documented on-site and has been studied ever since it occurred. This flash flood devastated Utvik (the hometown of WoWW’s project leader, Oddbjørn Bruland) and was the trigger to initiate the World of Wild Waters project. The extreme hydrologic event was analyzed in a journal article published last year in the international journal Hydrology Research. This article served as basis for a further analysis of the hydraulics during the flash flood, which was carried out in a recent study by Adina and Michal (work package 2). The hydraulic study, titled “The Story of a Steep River: Causes and Effects of the Flash Flood on 24 July 2017 in Western Norway“, is now published in the international journal Water (Switzerland), which is open access.

The hydraulic study assesses the potential causes of the flash flood based on visual documentation (for instance, in the first figure below) and post-event fieldwork (for example, the second figure below). The field observations, combined with soft data (testimonies from eyewitnesses), helped to understand the potential effects of future flash floods in similar mountain rivers. Additionally, the journal article is supplemented by a dataset (publicly available in Zenodo) that can be used in future studies, where the flash flood could be modelled numerically.

Visual documentation of the flash flood in July 2017. Figure from Moraru et al. (2021)

WoWW aims to have a digital twin of the flash flood devastating Utvik. Thus a numerical model of this flash flood might be used for future studies on gamification of natural hazards (work package 4) and risk perception using virtual reality (work package 5). Moreover, the river is continuously monitored with surveillance cameras and instruments that provide the level of the water in real-time. This allows an automatized data collection for future events in Storelva river and also an instantaneous reference of the current condition of the river.

Field visit with master students to Storelva river in Utvik after the flood (autumn 2019) to analyze post-flood restoration measures (© Adina Moraru).