Environmental Modeling for Hydrogeological and Hydrogeomorphological Geohazards: River and Urban Floods Influenced by Climate Change

Dear Colleagues,

The population is becoming increasingly clustered in large urban settings such that by 2050, it is estimated that 68% of the world’s population will be concentrated in large urban agglomerations, compared to 55% today. Against this background, it is vital to incorporate the analysis of environment and natural risks in resource and land use planning, especially when delimiting new areas that can be urbanized, with the aim of ensuring greater protection of the population and its goods. However, in many cases, the expansion and densification of large cities has been faster than the enactment of regulations relating to the protection of the population, such as for detecting an increase in natural risks, such as floods. The impact of floods on society is affected by the increase in extreme meteorological phenomena linked to global warming, increasing the virulence of floods and their danger and, with it, the risk to which the population is exposed, considering both vulnerability and exposure.

From the end of the 19th century, industrialization caused the occupation of flood plains and, consequently, the expansion of urban areas to lower areas of river basins, which led to a social demand for protection measures of a structural or nonstructural type against the risk of floods. A flood is the response of the river system to the massive arrival of water from rain or snow; or, else, the result of the sudden alteration of the hydrological conditions of a river. The river basin adapts to the specific energy conditions through the processes of erosion, transport, and sedimentation through a “geomorphological work”. These geomorphological features will condition the generation of avenues such that the processes of formation and transfer of runoff take place in the upper and middle zones of the rivers, whereas in the lower sectors, the processes of overflow and flooding predominate when the flow exceeds evacuation capacity. Extraordinary runoff causes a fluvial flood when the flow exceeds the evacuation capacity of the channel and the water occupies the floodplain built by the river itself to cushion or absorb the flood, being a natural hydrogeomorphological phenomenon.

This Special Issue is proposed in consideration of all of the above, in which historical, geomorphological, and hydrological and hydraulic modeling analyses that allow estimating the danger of flood risk can be covered. Cartography based on GIS and remote sensing techniques is important to delimit the return periods of the avenues and the statistical analysis of the meteorological series or of flow data stations, affection to urban centers, and the response to global climate change with different climatic and hydrogeomorphological scenarios that take into account hydrodynamics in a geological and natural context to design sustainable architectural structures.

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• hydrogeomorphology
• morphodynamic analysis
• flood mapping
• urban flood assessment
• river flows and floods
• hydrological statistics
• extreme events and climate change
• quality of aquifers