Flood – WoWW

Flood papers alert 2023

30. August 202313. February 2024
by Adina Moraru

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

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3rd IAHR Young Professionals congress

12. December 202216. December 2022
by Adina Moraru

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)

30. June 20226. December 2022
by Adina Moraru

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)

Flood

Editor’s choice awarded to flash flood journal article

10. November 20214. August 2022
by Adina Moraru

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:

The article get’s a blue-colored label (see snapshot above) that helps identify Adina and Michal’s manuscript as high quality.
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.
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).

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Flash flood depicted in new journal article

21. June 202115. July 2021
by Adina Moraru

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).

conference

1st IAHR Young Professionals congress

20. November 202015. July 2021
by Adina Moraru

The International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) has hosted their first Young Professionals congress this week. The congress aims 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 (streamed live in YouTube) and gathered nearly 1,000 attendees.

Michal, Nitesh and Adina took part in the congress and the latter two presented their most recent findings in form of extended abstracts and posters in the Flood Risk Management session, chaired by Stefan Haun (Stuttgart University in Germany) and Benjamin Dewals (University of Liège in Belgium), and moderated by José M. Carrillo (Technical University of Cartagena in Spain). Both presentations were recorded by the congress organizing committee and are available down below.

Adina presented an overview of her research, namely “Optimization and visualization of numerical models of flash floods in steep Norwegian rivers“, where she compared the computing effort of High-Performance Computing with the standard computing versions for a small 2D hydrodynamic model based on the 2017 flood in Utvik (western Norway).

Michal and Nitesh presented “Coupled hydrodynamic and hydrologic modelling using Telemac-2D” in a different study case in western Norway. The focus was on testing the effect of modelling short and long term Antecedent Moisture Conditions, mesh size and steep slope correction. The congress proceedings will be available in the e-Library of IAHR.

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Reconnaissance fieldtrips during late Autumn

17. November 202015. July 2021
by Adina Moraru

After a considerable long period without fieldtrips due to the SARS-CoV-2, and just before a new wave hit us all, WoWW sought for calibration and validation data for its hydraulic numerical models. Although the likelihood of flooding decreases considerably during the cold Norwegian Autumn, Oddbjørn, Michal and Adina visited two mountainous localities, namely Oppdal in Central Norway and Stryn in West Norway.

Vekveselva river (in Oppdal) has a step-pool morphology and a steep slope, which makes it very attractive from the hydraulic and geomorphological perspectives, as this makes the river and valley susceptible to both floods and landslides. The weather was cloudy and slightly windy and snow has started to accumulate in the last few weeks (see the first gallery of photos below). These factors, together with an unstable phone/GPS signal, made the task of using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (aka drone) challenging. In addition, most of the selected reach had ice accumulation. In order to gain expertise and overcome the aforementioned challenges, WoWW allied with the department of Geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The Norwegian Meteorological Institute forecasted heavy rain for Storelva river in Utvik (in Stryn) during early November and Michal and Adina drove to the West of Norway spontaneously. Although the weather resulted drier than predicted and the river barely carried water, the snow from the mountains has not yet reached the river downstream by the fjord. The wind did not encourage to fly the drone, however, they did experiment with acoustic (i.e. ADCP) and salt dilution gauging methods (see the gallery of photos below).

Storelva river in Utvik was flooded during summer 2017 and now flood-protection measures have been implemented. The channel has been excavated and a dyke has been built to protect the adjacent houses, formerly affected by the flash flood. The new channel shape demands for a new data set for ongoing research on flood risk in Stryn. The Norwegian winter is coming and the field work season comes to an end. Further attempts to obtain field data in Central and West Norway will be conducted during spring, once the snow has melted. A manuscript analyzing the hydrology of the 2017 flood was published in Hydrology Research this spring, and the efforts are now focused on understanding the hydrodynamics and the morphodynamics of the flood.

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River Flow 2020

17. July 202015. July 2021
by Adina Moraru

The 10th International Conference in Fluvial Hydraulics, organized by TU Delft, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Deltares and Rijkswaterstaat (Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, the Netherlands), together with the International Association for Hydro- Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) and the Netherlands Centre for River Studies (NCR), has been held from the 7th to the 10th of July.

Researchers from water-related disciplines like Hydraulics, Morphodynamics, Ecology and Integral approaches presented their work digitally, and the contents were exceptionally available for the attendees to discuss upon until the 17th of July due to the COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. Among the varied topics in fluid mechanics, river monitoring, extreme events and rivers under pressure, few studies focused on optimized numerical modelling techniques, as well as visualization and flood risk communication.

Flood risk communication using digital twins (Heyer et al., 2020)

Adina presented the “Current trends in the optimization of hydraulic flood simulations in ungauged steep rivers” in the session “Numerical Modelling – Applications”. Her presentation (available here) summarized few optimization techniques nowadays applied to the the hydraulic analysis of floods and addressed their advantages and limitations when applied to steep rivers where historical hydrologic data is seldom available.

Alongside with the different thematic sessions arranged, young researchers were given the opportunity to present and discuss varied topics in masterclasses arranged by experienced researchers. For instance, Adina participated on the 6th of July in the masterclass “The Digital River”, organized by Enrica Viparelli (University of South Carolina) and Ioana Popescu (IHE Delft).

The Digital River masterclass, held during River Flow 2020 (© E. Viparelli)

The conference program had other highlights, such as an e-social gathering and keynote lectures in “Future generations fighting climate change” (Gabriela Eslava Bejarano, Columbia University, USA), “Rivers Dynamics in Regions of Rapid Climate Change” (Irina Overeem, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA) and “When a tree falls in a river… a cascade process begins” (Virginia Ruiz-Villanueva, University of Lausanne, Switzerland).