Modeling rainfall input variability for flash floods in Portugal: the influence of predisposing factors
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Flash floods are often responsible for deaths and damage to infrastructure. The objective of this work is to create a data-driven model to understand how predisposing factors influence the spatial variation of the triggering factor (rainfall intensity) in the case of flash floods in the continental area of Portugal. Flash floods occurrences were extracted from the DISASTER database. We extracted the accumulated precipitation from the Copernicus database by considering two days of duration. The analysed predisposing factors for flooding were extracted considering the whole basin where each occurrence is located. These factors include the basin area, the predominant lithology, drainage density, and the mean or median values of elevation, slope, stream power index (SPI), topographic wetness index (TWI), roughness, and four soil properties. The Random Forest algorithm was used to build the models and obtained mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) around 19%, an acceptable value for the objectives of the work. The median of SPI, mean elevation and the area of the basin are the top three most relevant predisposing factors interpreted by the model for defining the rainfall input for flash flooding in mainland Portugal.
Source: Figshare
Authors: Villaça, Caio, Santos, Pedro Pinto, Zêzere, José Luís
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6902341591
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