A novel conceptual flood inundation model for large scale data-scarce regions

We propose a novel conceptual flood inundation model that can be coupled with any hydrological model to generate the probabilistic flood extent maps for a given time step. We generate the runoff rasters using the dynamic Budyko hydrological model that uses the regional IMD/CPC precipitation datasets and the global JAXA GSMaP gauge-precipitation (V7) product over Kerala/Louisiana flood events during August 2018/2016. A freely available global dataset is used for obtaining river geometry information and topographic information is obtained from ASTER/SRTM DEM and localised LiDAR DEM. We evaluated the proposed model using the ground observed flood points from the state disaster management agency for Kerala and flood maps published by USGS for Louisiana. The proposed model captured similar to 45% of flooding during peak flood days while taking similar to 15 min for each run on a daily time step on a desktop computer.