An urban DEM reconstruction method based on multisource data fusion for urban pluvial flooding simulation

A digital elevation model (DEM) is crucial for hydraulic/hydrodynamic simulation of urban pluvial flooding. To reduce the simulation error caused by the low resolution and poor vertical accuracy of DEM data, a novel urban terrain reconstruction method is proposed based on multisource data fusion (MDF). A 1D-2D coupled pluvial flood model under the typhoon rainfall scenario is built to verify the superiority of the proposed method. The results show that the systematic elevation error of terrain is reduced with MDF-kriging and MDF-IDW, and the performances of simulations are improved by 5% and 23% in terms of peak water-level error compared to using conventional kriging and IDW methods, and by 0.13m and 0.11m in terms of manhole water level accuracy compared to using raw DEM. Moreover, the temporospatial patterns of the flooding simulation results are more rational with the scattered flooding eliminated, and the proportion of flood area with ground elevation lower than 8 m increased from 37.9% to 92.34% and 89.33%, respectively. This method is proven to be a notably effective and low-cost DEM reconstruction method for improving the accuracy of urban pluvial flooding simulation.