What can we learn from a 500-year event? Experiences from urban drainage in Austria

Urban drainage systems are designed to capture the runoff for a certain return period of a design rainfall event. Typically, numerical models are used, which are calibrated by comparing model response and measured system performance. The applicability of such models to predict the system behaviour under extreme events is unclear, as usually then no data are available. This paper describes the analysis of an extreme rainfall event in the year 2016. The event is characterized by a very short duration and very high rainfall intensities. The maximum-recorded rainfall peak was 47.1 mm rainfall within 10 min, which corresponds to a return period of 500 years. The event caused local flooding on streets, interruptions of traffic and damages in buildings. In order to improve the flood resilience of the city, the event was analysed with an existing 1D hydrodynamic model of the sewer system. Model results were compared to water level measurements in the drainage system and citizen observations of surface flooding (gathered from social media and citizen reports). Although the hydrodynamic model could reproduce water level measurements in parts of the system, the plausibility check using descriptive data showed that the model failed to predict flooding in some areas.