Flood Modelling: Recent Indian Contributions

Abstract

Flood modelling is an important first step towards understanding and managing floods, at all spatial scales, from a large catchment of a river to  highly developed urban areas and to individual property and infrastructure. Recent advances in modelling techniques along with sophisticated computational tools and data products have facilitated a rapid progress in flood modelling. Despite this progress, an accurate assessment and forecasting of floods with the associated risk is still elusive due to uncertainties at each stage of the modelling. This paper presents a review of flood modelling with specific focus on India. In recent years, significant contributions have been made by Indian researchers to the hydrologic science in general, and to flood modelling in particular. Indian contributions to the areas of hydrologic modelling of floods, flood forecasting, flash flood modelling, urban floods, and risk assessment and mitigation are reviewed in the paper. Since the emphasis is on flood modelling, the related topics of flood frequency analysis are excluded, although some representative studies on extreme rainfall frequencies are briefly mentioned. The paper concludes with some perspectives on future directions in flood modelling and actions needed for sustainable flood management practices, in the country.