Effectiveness of water infrastructure for river flood management – Part 1: Flood hazard assessment using hydrological models in Bangladesh

Abstract. This study introduces a flood hazard assessment part of the global flood risk assessment (Part 2) conducted with a distributed hydrological Block-wise TOP (BTOP) model and a GIS-based Flood Inundation Depth (FID) model. In this study, the 20 km grid BTOP model was developed with globally available data on and applied for the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna (GBM) river basin. The BTOP model was calibrated with observed river discharges in Bangladesh and was applied for climate change impact assessment to produce flood discharges at each BTOP cell under present and future climates. For Bangladesh, the cumulative flood inundation maps were produced using the FID model with the BTOP simulated flood discharges and allowed us to consider levee effectiveness for reduction of flood inundation. For the climate change impacts, the flood hazard increased both in flood discharge and inundation area for the 50- and 100-year floods. From these preliminary results, the proposed methodology can partly overcome the limitation of the data unavailability and produces flood~maps that can be used for the nationwide flood risk assessment, which is presented in Part 2 of this study.