Water stress indicator

Description

The water stress indicator yields insight into the flood resilience of built areas (default: neighborhoods) based on the fraction of total built area in that area which inundates beyond the preconfigured threshold inundation level (default: 0.05 m). Despite it being only a rather simplistic measure, it differentiates well between the more resilient (usually greener) areas and those less capable of dealing with excessive inflow of water.

The indicator can prove especially suitable for:

• standardized stress testing, as it provides information on the individual and mean performance of the neighborhoods after having been exposed to, for instance, an hour-long, 60-mm/h rainfall event.

By default the area type under consideration are neighborhoods and the inundation threshold is set at 0.05 m (i.e., a 5-cm thick layer of water across the built area of a neighborhood). These parameters can be manually changed according the user’s wishes by simply editing the indicator.xlsx file. The indicator table already provides an extra column indicating the amount of road/street exceeding the threshold, which can be easily extended into a more meaningful test result.

For more in-depth information on the indicator and its underlying calculations, please refer to the manual.