An integrated approach to streamflow estimation and flood inundation mapping using VIC, RAPID and LISFLOOD-FP

Controlling the damaging effects of fluvial flood events has been a major challenge for mankind. Integrated hydrologic-hydrodynamic models are often employed to estimate the flow and vital flood inundation information for mitigating such damages. The most important criterion for their implementation is that they should offer large-scale applicability with a finer resolution to have local relevance and practicability. This study presented an integrated modeling framework, VIC-RAPID-LISFP that couples a hydrological model (VIC), a river routing model (RAPID) and a hydrodynamic model (LISFLOOD-FP) for fast generation of high-resolution flow and flood inundation extent. The utility of the model is tested and demonstrated for a case study in the Upper Krishna River basin in India. The results showed that the simulated hourly streamflows from the calibrated model match reasonably well with the observations in terms of various efficiency measures. Also, the generated flood inundation maps from the model can reliably capture more than 80% of the satellite-derived flood inundation extent during both the low and high flow events. The proposed modeling framework is based on readily available open-source hydrographic data, and minimum meteorological information, so it has global applicability for supporting a flood management system with local relevance, especially for the data-scarce regions.