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Global flood management is a major issue for most cities which have to deal with worsening factors such as climate change and fast urban growth. Computer models have been used to model and understand urban flooding on a local scale in cities (25–50 km2). It has been practically impossible to model bigger cities in one go in sufficiently high resolution due to the heavy computations involved. The present paper describes a new modelling approach for urban flooding which allows modelling on large city scale (1000 km2) while keeping sufficient resolution, e.g. 5 m or 10 m grid. The multicell approach is applied for the city of Beijing for July 21st, 2012 flood event. Model results are compared to testimonials from the 2012 event. Comparison to traditional 2D urban flood computations shows that the multicell approach is much faster than standard detailed models while keeping a suitable level of precision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is raising the world's temperature, thereby causing residents to use more water for uses such as drinking and irrigation. This increase in water usage causes municipal water distribution systems (WDS) to use more electricity for pumping. In addition to the increased greenhouse gases emitted by coal-powered electricity generation, there will be a need for water system managers to increase their electricity budgets. This study uses computer modelling of fifteen different water distribution systems to quantify how much additional energy will be used in the future climate-change temperature scenarios. It was found that the average slope of the energy increase with climate-driven water demand is 0.91 with a minimum for any system of practically nothing and a maximum of 3.46. Water managers can use these values to perform budgetary planning for clime-driven future scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]