13 Climate Action depict the complexities of flooding as runoff spreads across city landscapes. For their study of Los Angeles, Sanders and colleagues built a numerical model capable of simulating flooding at a spatial resolution of three meters across the nearly 7,000-squarekilometer area of greater Los Angeles. “Existing models for doing accurate local inundation mapping in the past haven’t let modelers study a region the size of Los Angeles County at once at this resolution,” he says. They began building their map with topographic data and digital elevation models (DEM) based on aerial lidar or photogrammetric surveys. “It’s fine enough that we can The Parallel Raster Inundation Model, or PRIMo, is designed for whole-city-scale hazard modeling. resolve a road and how low the road is and how much water might run down a road.” Still, the surface data misses all the complexity underground, such as pipes and culverts. Sanders and his colleagues turn to local governments for ancillary datasets, such as shapefiles for stormwater infrastructure and path lines for pipes. From there, they “hydrocondition” the data to represent the functional effects of the infrastructure on the map and simulate different kinds of floods. Running these simulations demands the supercomputing powers of parallel servers, but this introduces its own
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