부산대학교 도서관

Forecasted increases in flood risk from future changes in precipitation patterns and sea level rise and storm surge events prompted the city of Cambridge to start a pilot program to assess feasible mitigation and resilience measures in the Alewife Brook area within the city. Because the potential magnitude of these inundation events extends well beyond the city's boundaries and are likely to be caused by factors mostly at the watershed or regional scale, the city has decided to build a fully integrated model of the Mystic River watershed. The Alewife Brook is one of the tributaries to the Mystic River. The integrated model includes the hydrology and riverine geometry of the entire watershed and has been greatly refined within Cambridge's boundaries to include the city's sewer system model. The sewer system model has been seamlessly integrated with the riverine model and now allows for modeling of the highly dynamic and interdependent interactions between both environments. Additionally, in the integrated platform, the floodplain within Cambridge was represented with a high-resolution, two-dimensional grid also seamlessly coupled with the riverine and sewer platforms. The integrated model of the Mystic River watershed was successfully calibrated and validated using two large historical storms known to have caused flooding in some areas within Cambridge. Calibration was performed using three different river gauges as well as photographic evidence provided by the city and others. The calibrated model is now ready for evaluating the relative benefit of proposed mitigation measures, individually or in combination, and to quantify potential impacts these measures may have on the rest of the watershed communities. This tool is now readily available to kick-start collaboration among stakeholders confronting a problem that poses a great risk moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]