Articles | Volume 30, issue 5
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-1333-2026
© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-1333-2026
© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Climate adaptation-aware flood prediction for coastal cities using Deep Learning
Division of Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Areg Karapetyan
Division of Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Aaron Chung Hin Chow
Division of Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Samer Madanat
Division of Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Cited articles
Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council: Abu Dhabi 2030: Urban Structure Framework Plan, https://www.ecouncil.ae/PublicationsEn/plan-abu-dhabi-full-version-EN.pdf (last access: 6 October 2024), 2007. a
Ali, M. H. M., Asmai, S. A., Abidin, Z. Z., Abas, Z. A., and Emran, N. A.: Flood prediction using deep learning models, Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl., 13, 972–981, https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2022.01309112, 2022. a
al Kabban, Marwa: Sea Level Rise Vulnerability Assessment for Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Student Paper, http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/8998495 (last access: 19 December 2024), 2019. a
Al Senafi, F. and Anis, A.: Shamals and climate variability in the Northern Arabian/Persian Gulf from 1973 to 2012, Int. J. Climatol., 35, 4509–4528, https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.4302, 2015. a
Ardha, M., Chulafak, G. A., Anggraini, N., Syetiawan, A., and Khomarudin, M. R.: Flood inundation prediction model related to land subsidence with Lidar in North Coastal Jakarta, in: Eighth Geoinformation Science Symposium 2023: Geoinformation Science for Sustainable Planet, vol. 12977, 392–401, SPIE, https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3009685, 2024. a
Barnard, P. L., van Ormondt, M., Erikson, L. H., Eshleman, J., Hapke, C., Ruggiero, P., Adams, P. N., and Foxgrover, A. C.: Development of the Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS) for predicting the impact of storms on high-energy, active-margin coasts, Natural Hazards, 74, 1095–1125, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-014-1236-y, 2014. a
Barnard, P. L., Befus, K. M., Danielson, J. J., Engelstad, A. C., Erikson, L. H., Foxgrover, A. C., Hayden, M. K., Hoover, D. J., Leijnse, T. W. B., Massey, C., McCall, R., Nadal-Caraballo, N. C., Nederhoff, K., O'Neill, A. C., Parker, K. A., Shirzaei, M., Ohenhen, L. O., Swarzenski, P. W., Thomas, J. A., van Ormondt, M., Vitousek, S., Vos, K., Wood, N. J., Jones, J. M., and Jones, J. L.: Projections of multiple climate-related coastal hazards for the US Southeast Atlantic, Nat. Clim. Change, 15, pages 101–109, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02180-2, 2024. a
Beagle, J., Lowe, J., McKnight, K., Safran, S., Tam, L., and Szambelan, S. J.: San Francisco Bay shoreline adaptation atlas: Working with nature to plan for sea level rise using operational landscape units, SFEI publication# 915, SFEI, https://trid.trb.org/View/1605924 (last access: 25 November 2024), 2019. a, b
Bentivoglio, R., Isufi, E., Jonkman, S. N., and Taormina, R.: Deep learning methods for flood mapping: a review of existing applications and future research directions, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 26, 4345–4378, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-4345-2022, 2022. a
California Energy Commission: San Francisco Bay Area Report, California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment, https://www.energy.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2019-11/Reg_Report-SUM-CCCA4-2018-005_SanFranciscoBayArea_ADA.pdf (last access: 4 October 2024), 2018. a
Cao, A., Esteban, M., Valenzuela, V. P. B., Onuki, M., Takagi, H., Thao, N. D., and Tsuchiya, N.: Future of Asian Deltaic Megacities under sea level rise and land subsidence: current adaptation pathways for Tokyo, Jakarta, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 50, 87–97, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.02.010, 2021. a
Cao, H., Wang, Y., Chen, J., Jiang, D., Zhang, X., Tian, Q., and Wang, M.: Swin-unet: Unet-like pure transformer for medical image segmentation, in: European conference on computer vision, 205–218, Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25066-8_9, 2022. a
Chang, S. E., Yip, J. Z., Conger, T., Oulahen, G., Gray, E., and Marteleira, M.: Explaining communities' adaptation strategies for coastal flood risk: Vulnerability and institutional factors, J. Flood Risk Manage., 13, e12646, https://doi.org/10.1111/jfr3.12646, 2020. a
Chen, G., Hou, J., Liu, Y., Xue, S., Wu, H., Wang, T., Lv, J., Jing, J., and Yang, S.: Urban inundation rapid prediction method based on multi-machine learning algorithm and rain pattern analysis, J. Hydrol., 633, 131059, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2024.131059, 2024. a
Chow, A. C. and Sun, J.: Combining Sea level rise inundation impacts, tidal flooding and extreme wind events along the Abu Dhabi coastline, Hydrology, 9, 143, https://doi.org/10.3390/hydrology9080143, 2022. a, b
De Almeida, G. A. and Bates, P.: Applicability of the local inertial approximation of the shallow water equations to flood modeling, Water Resour. Res., 49, 4833–4844, https://doi.org/10.1002/wrcr.20366, 2013. a
Deltares: Delft3d, https://oss.deltares.nl/web/delft3d, last access: 12 January 2025. a
Deng, J., Dong, W., Socher, R., Li, L.-J., Li, K., and Fei-Fei, L.: Imagenet: A large-scale hierarchical image database, in: 2009 IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, 248–255, Ieee, https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2009.5206848, 2009. a, b
Du, B., Wang, M., Zhang, J., Chen, Y., and Wang, T.: Urban flood prediction based on PCSWMM and stacking integrated learning model, Natural Hazards, 121, 1971–1995, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-024-06893-7, 2024. a
Griggs, G. and Reguero, B. G.: Coastal adaptation to climate change and sea-level rise, Water, 13, 2151, https://doi.org/10.3390/w13162151, 2021. a
Guo, Z., Leitao, J. P., Simões, N. E., and Moosavi, V.: Data-driven flood emulation: Speeding up urban flood predictions by deep convolutional neural networks, J. Flood Risk Manage., 14, e12684, https://doi.org/10.1111/jfr3.12684, 2021. a
Haigh, I. D., Pickering, M. D., Green, J. A. M., Arbic, B. K., Arns, A., Dangendorf, S., Hill, D. F., Horsburgh, K., Howard, T., Idier, D., Jay, D. A., Jänicke, L., Lee, S. B., Müller, M., Schindelegger, M., Talke, S. A., Wilmes, S.-B., and Woodworth, P. L.: The tides they are a-Changin': A comprehensive review of past and future nonastronomical changes in tides, their driving mechanisms, and future implications, Rev. Geophys., 58, e2018RG000636, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018RG000636, 2020. a
Hallegatte, S., Green, C., Nicholls, R. J., and Corfee-Morlot, J.: Future flood losses in major coastal cities, Nat. Clim. Change, 3, 802–806, https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1979, 2013. a
Hartnett, M. and Nash, S.: High-resolution flood modeling of urban areas using MSN_Flood, Water Science and Engineering, 10, 175–183, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wse.2017.10.003, 2017. a
Hassan, B.: San Francisco Bay Area Coastal Flood Prediction Dataset for Deep Learning, Harvard Dataverse, V1 [data set], https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RPHXGV, 2026. a
Hassani, A., Walton, S., Shah, N., Abuduweili, A., Li, J., and Shi, H.: Escaping the big data paradigm with compact transformers, arXiv [preprint], arXiv:2104.05704, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2104.05704, 2021. a
Holleman, R. C. and Stacey, M. T.: Coupling of sea level rise, tidal amplification, and inundation, J. Phys. Oceanogr., 44, 1439–1455, https://doi.org/10.1175/JPO-D-13-0214.1, 2014. a
Huber, P. J.: Robust estimation of a location parameter, in: Breakthroughs in statistics: Methodology and distribution, 492–518, Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4380-9_35, 1992. a
Hummel, M. A., Griffin, R., Arkema, K., and Guerry, A. D.: Economic evaluation of sea-level rise adaptation strongly influenced by hydrodynamic feedbacks, P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 118, e2025961118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025961118, 2021. a, b
IPCC: Climate change 2021: the physical science basis, Contribution of working group I to the sixth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, 2, 2391, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157896, 2021. a, b, c
Jia, G., Taflanidis, A. A., Nadal-Caraballo, N. C., Melby, J. A., Kennedy, A. B., and Smith, J. M.: Surrogate modeling for peak or time-dependent storm surge prediction over an extended coastal region using an existing database of synthetic storms, Natural Hazards, 81, 909–938, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-015-2111-1, 2016. a
Koenker, R. and Bassett Jr., G.: Regression quantiles, Econometrica, 46, 33–50, https://doi.org/10.2307/1913643, 1978. a
Kyprioti, A. P., Taflanidis, A. A., Nadal-Caraballo, N. C., and Campbell, M.: Storm hazard analysis over extended geospatial grids utilizing surrogate models, Coastal Eng., 168, 103855, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coastaleng.2021.103855, 2021. a, b
Lakshminarayanan, B., Pritzel, A., and Blundell, C.: Simple and scalable predictive uncertainty estimation using deep ensembles, Advances In Neural Information Processing Systems, 3, 6402–6413, 2017. a
Langodan, S., Cavaleri, L., Benetazzo, A., Bertotti, L., Dasari, H. P., and Hoteit, I.: The peculiar wind and wave climatology of the Arabian Gulf, Ocean Eng., 290, 116158, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oceaneng.2023.116158, 2023. a
Lewis, A.: After a Decade of Planning, New York City Is Raising Its Shoreline, Yale School of the Environment, https://e360.yale.edu/features/new-york-city-climate-plan-sea-level-rise (last access: 2 December 2024), 2023. a
Li, D., Anis, A., and Al Senafi, F.: Physical response of the Northern Arabian Gulf to winter Shamals, J. Marine Syst., 203, 103280, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmarsys.2019.103280, 2020. a
Li, Z. and Hodges, B. R.: Modeling subgrid-scale topographic effects on shallow marsh hydrodynamics and salinity transport, Adv. Water Resour., 129, 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advwatres.2019.05.004, 2019. a
Melville-Rea, H., Eayrs, C., Anwahi, N., Burt, J. A., Holland, D., Samara, F., Paparella, F., Al Murshidi, A. H., Al-Shehhi, M. R., and Holland, D. M.: A roadmap for policy-relevant sea-level rise research in the United Arab Emirates, Front. Marine Sci., 8, 670089, https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.670089, 2021. a, b
Mosavi, A., Ozturk, P., and Chau, K.-W.: Flood prediction using machine learning models: Literature review, Water, 10, 1536, https://doi.org/10.3390/w10111536, 2018. a, b
Muñoz, D. F., Moftakhari, H., and Moradkhani, H.: Quantifying cascading uncertainty in compound flood modeling with linked process-based and machine learning models, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 28, 2531–2553, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-2531-2024, 2024. a
Neal, J., Schumann, G., and Bates, P.: A subgrid channel model for simulating river hydraulics and floodplain inundation over large and data sparse areas, Water Resour. Res., 48, https://doi.org/10.1029/2012WR012514, 2012. a
Nevo, S., Morin, E., Gerzi Rosenthal, A., Metzger, A., Barshai, C., Weitzner, D., Voloshin, D., Kratzert, F., Elidan, G., Dror, G., Begelman, G., Nearing, G., Shalev, G., Noga, H., Shavitt, I., Yuklea, L., Royz, M., Giladi, N., Peled Levi, N., Reich, O., Gilon, O., Maor, R., Timnat, S., Shechter, T., Anisimov, V., Gigi, Y., Levin, Y., Moshe, Z., Ben-Haim, Z., Hassidim, A., and Matias, Y.: Flood forecasting with machine learning models in an operational framework, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 26, 4013–4032, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-4013-2022, 2022. a
Nithila Devi, N. and Kuiry, S. N.: A novel local-inertial formulation representing subgrid scale topographic effects for urban flood simulation, Water Resour. Res., 60, e2023WR035334, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023WR035334, 2024. a
Oktay, O., Schlemper, J., Le Folgoc, L., Lee, M., Heinrich, M., Misawa, K., Mori, K., McDonagh, S., Hammerla, N. Y., Kainz, B., Glocker, B., and Rueckert, D.: Attention u-net: Learning where to look for the pancreas, arXiv [preprint], arXiv:1804.03999, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1804.03999, 2018. a
Oppenheimer, M., Glavovic, B. C., Hinkel, J., van de Wal, R., Magnan, A. K., Abd-Elgawad, A., Cai, R., Cifuentes-Jara, M., DeConto, R. M., Ghosh, T., Hay, J., Isla, F., Marzeion, B., Meyssignac, B., and Sebesvari, Z.: Sea Level Rise and Implications for Low-Lying Islands, Coasts and Communities, 321–446, Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157964.006, 2022. a
Pal, I., Kumar, A., and Mukhopadhyay, A.: Risks to Coastal Critical Infrastructure from Climate Change, Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour., 48, 681–712, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-112320-101903, 2023. a
Papacharalambous, M., Davis, M., Marshall, W., Weems, P., and Rothenberg, R.: Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan: Implementation, Waggonner & Ball Architects: New Orleans, LA, USA, https://wbae.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/GNO-Urban-Water-Plan_Implementation_03Oct2013.pdf (last access: 8 March 2026), 2013. a
Rohmer, J., Sire, C., Lecacheux, S., Idier, D., and Pedreros, R.: Improved metamodels for predicting high-dimensional outputs by accounting for the dependence structure of the latent variables: application to marine flooding, Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, 37, 2919–2941, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-023-02426-z, 2023. a, b
Saleh, R. A. and Saleh, A.: Statistical properties of the log-cosh loss function used in machine learning, arXiv [preprint], arXiv:2208.04564, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2208.04564, 2022. a
Sanders, B. F. and Schubert, J. E.: PRIMo: Parallel raster inundation model, Adv. Water Resour., 126, 79–95, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advwatres.2019.02.007, 2019. a
Sun, J., Chow, A. C., and Madanat, S. M.: Multimodal transportation system protection against sea level rise, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 88, 102568, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2020.102568, 2020. a
United States Geological Survey: Modeled surface waves from winds in South San Francisco Bay, https://www.usgs.gov/data/modeled-surface-waves-winds-south-san-francisco-bay (last access: 18 September 2024), https://doi.org/10.5066/P9QH0GU5, 2024. a
van de Wal, R., Melet, A., Bellafiore, D., Camus, P., Ferrarin, C., Oude Essink, G., Haigh, I. D., Lionello, P., Luijendijk, A., Toimil, A., Staneva, J., and Vousdoukas, M.: Sea Level Rise in Europe: Impacts and consequences, in: Sea Level Rise in Europe: 1st Assessment Report of the Knowledge Hub on Sea Level Rise (SLRE1), edited by: van den Hurk, B., Pinardi, N., Kiefer, T., Larkin, K., Manderscheid, P., and Richter, K., Copernicus Publications, State Planet, 3-slre1, 5, https://doi.org/10.5194/sp-3-slre1-5-2024, 2024. a
Wang, R.-Q., Herdman, L. M., Erikson, L., Barnard, P., Hummel, M., and Stacey, M. T.: Interactions of estuarine shoreline infrastructure with multiscale sea level variability, J. Geophys. Res.-Oceans, 122, 9962–9979, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017JC012730, 2017. a, b
Wang, R.-Q., Stacey, M. T., Herdman, L. M. M., Barnard, P. L., and Erikson, L.: The influence of sea level rise on the regional interdependence of coastal infrastructure, Earth's Future, 6, 677–688, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017EF000742, 2018a. a, b
Wang, Y., Chen, A. S., Fu, G., Djordjević, S., Zhang, C., and Savić, D. A.: An integrated framework for high-resolution urban flood modelling considering multiple information sources and urban features, Environ. Model. Softw., 107, 85–95, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2018.06.010, 2018b. a
Woo, S., Park, J., Lee, J.-Y., and Kweon, I. S.: Cbam: Convolutional block attention module, in: Proceedings of the European conference on computer vision (ECCV), 3–19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01234-2_1, 2018. a
Xie, S., Girshick, R., Dollár, P., Tu, Z., and He, K.: Aggregated residual transformations for deep neural networks, in: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, 1492–1500, https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2017.634, 2017. a
Zhao, G., Bates, P., Neal, J., and Pang, B.: Design flood estimation for global river networks based on machine learning models, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 25, 5981–5999, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-5981-2021, 2021. a
Zhou, Q., Teng, S., Situ, Z., Liao, X., Feng, J., Chen, G., Zhang, J., and Lu, Z.: A deep-learning-technique-based data-driven model for accurate and rapid flood predictions in temporal and spatial dimensions, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 27, 1791–1808, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-27-1791-2023, 2023. a
Zuhairi, A. H., Yakub, F., Zaki, S. A., and Ali, M. S. M.: Review of flood prediction hybrid machine learning models using datasets, in: IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, IOP Publishing, 1091, 012040, https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/1091/1/012040, 2022. a
Short summary
In this research, we developed an AI-driven framework that rapidly predicts floods in coastal areas, considering various shoreline protection strategies and a different sea-level rise scenarios. By combining data from two coastal cities, our lightweight model delivers near real-time flood projections under various adaptation strategies. This approach can guide policymakers in designing effective defenses, ultimately promoting safer coastal communities and infrastructure.
In this research, we developed an AI-driven framework that rapidly predicts floods in coastal...