Ice-jam flood forecasting and ice-jam flood risk assessment

这项NSERC发现拨款计划是一项雄心勃勃的五年研究计划，旨在促进对北部河流冰塞形成和洪水的了解。这项工作的重点是实现预报和评估冰塞洪水的长期目标。洪水是加拿大发生最多的水文/气象自然灾害事件，对于加拿大的大多数河流来说，每年的最高水位都是由于冰川堵塞。目前的冰堵洪水预警系统需要广泛的现场观测，具有相当大的不确定性，因此缺乏可靠性。尽管如此，政府机构、保险公司、城市规划者和开发商迫切需要洪水预报和风险地图。这项研究计划致力于开发新的工具来预测冰塞，并评估其对北部河流沿线社区的洪水风险。本研究项目旨在开发一种更可靠的建模系统。为了实现这一长期目标，将处理妨碍我们预测冰塞事件及其后果的能力的基本问题：(1)冰塞发生的经验标准；(2)地理空间建模，以确定河流沿线的冰塞位置；(3)河道-冰川水力模型与泛滥平原模型的耦合，以计算洪水对人类生命的危险；(4)冰塞洪水(经济)风险评估和测绘。

This NSERC Discovery Grant proposal is an ambitious five-year research program to advance understanding of ice-jam formation and flooding along northern rivers. This work focuses on achieving the long-term goal of forecasting and assessing ice-jam floods. Floods account for the greatest number of hydrological/meteorological natural disaster events in Canada and, for most Canadian rivers, the annual peak water levels are due to ice jams. Current ice-jam flood warning systems require extensive field observations, have considerable uncertainty and thus lack reliability. Nonetheless, flood forecasting and risk mapping are desperately needed by government agencies, insurance companies, urban planners, and developers. This research program strives to develop new tools to forecast ice jams and assess their subsequent flood risk to communities along northern rivers. This research program aims to develop a more reliable modelling system. To achieve this long-term goal, fundamental issues that impede our ability to predict ice-jam events and their consequences will be addressed: (i) empirical criteria for breakup occurrence, (ii) geospatial modelling to determine predispositions of ice jam locations along river stretches, (iii) coupling of a river-ice hydraulic model for the channel with a floodplain model to calculate flood hazard to human life and (iv) ice-jam flood (economic) risk assessment and mapping.