Multiphysics urban flood models are commonly used for urban infrastructure development planning and evaluating risk due to climate change and sea level rise. However, these integrated flood models rely on several parameters that are hard to measure directly, and the resulting uncertainty in model prediction needs to be quantified, often without observable data. As a part of the Urban Flooding Open Knowledge Network (UFOKN) project, in this study we quantify parametric uncertainty in urban flood models. UFOKN incorporates flood model predictions in combination with machine learning, data and computer science, epidemiology, socioeconomics, and transportation and electrical engineering to minimize economic and human losses from future urban flooding in the United States. As a case study, we choose the Interconnected Channel and Pond Routing (ICPR) numerical model to simulate flooding in the city of Minneapolis in response to the design storms (e.g., 100-year rainfall). Through a sensitivity study, we reduce the number of uncertain model parameters to the Manning’s roughness coefficient and vertical hydraulic conductivity of soil, and construct the distributions of these parameters using open databases. We employ the multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method that combines a small number of high-resolution ICPR simulations with a larger number of low-resolution simulations to reduce the computational cost of computing the key statistics of the quantities of interest describing the urban flooding. Our results show that the uncertainty in the flood predictions (as described by the coefficient of variation of the flood water depth) is distributed highly non-uniformly in the urban area with the coefficient of variation exceeding 0.5 limited to a relatively few computational elements in the ICPR model. Our results demonstrate that urban flood models such as ICPR can provide reliable flood predictions and can be used for a targeted data acquisition to further reduce the parametric uncertainty.

Infiltration processes in fractured-porous media remain a crucial, yet not very well understood component of recharge and vulnerability assessment. Under partially-saturated conditions flows in fractures, percolating fracture networks and fault zones contribute to the fastest spectrum of infiltration velocities via preferential pathways. Specifically, the partitioning dynamics at fracture intersections determine the magnitude of flow fragmentation into vertical and horizontal components and hence the bulk flow velocity and dispersion of fracture networks. In this work we derive an analytical solution for the partitioning processes based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations and laboratory studies. The developed transfer function allows to efficiently simulate flow through arbitrary long wide aperture fracture networks with simple cubic structure via linear response theory and convolution of a given input signal. We derive a non-dimensional bulk flow velocity ($\widetilde{v}$) and dispersion coefficient ($\widetilde{D}$) to characterize the system in terms of dimensionless horizontal and vertical time scales $\tau_m$ and $\tau_0$. The dispersion coefficient is shown to strongly depend on the horizontal time scale and converges towards a constant value of $0.08$ within reasonable ranges for the fluid and geometrical parameters, while the non-dimensional velocity exhibits a characteristic $\widetilde{v} \sim \tau_m^{-1/2}$ scaling. Given that hydraulic information is often only available at limited places within (fractured-porous) aquifer system, such as boreholes or springs, our study intends to provide a rudimentary analytical concept to potentially reconstruct internal fracture network geometries from external boundary information, e.g., the dispersive properties of discharge (groundwater level fluctuations).