Compound Flooding in a Non-Stationary World: A Primer for Practice

Compound flooding conditions present a significant challenge for civil engineers in their pursuit to design for and maintain the integrity of a structure’s entire life cycle. Coupled with non-stationary processes due to a changing climate and land use change, risk is a moving target. Through the support of ASCE’s Task Committee on Compound Flooding, the Hydroclimatology Engineering Adaptation (HYDEA) sub-committee is developing a Manual of Practice (MOP) to provide a synthesis of available tools and methods of best practice for civil engineers designing for compound flooding conditions. This paper presents a primer for practicing civil engineers on this work. Hydrodynamic process-based models such as rainfall-runoff, riverine, and coastal modeling, as well as statistical models including multivariate statistical models, will be addressed. In addition, the importance of linking statistical and process-based models and their various approaches is identified. The MOP also discusses addressing nonstationarity due to changing local and regional conditions and tools to assess risk and uncertainty.