Exploration of land-use scenarios for flood hazard modeling – the case of Santiago de Chile

Abstract. Urban expansion leads to modifications in land use and land cover and to the loss of vegetated areas. These developments are in some regions of the world accelerated by a changing regional climate. As a consequence, major changes in the amount of green spaces can be observed in many urban regions. Amongst other dependences the amount of green spaces determines the availability of retention areas in a watershed. The goal of this research is to develop possible land-use and land-cover scenarios for a watershed and to explore the influence of land-use and land-cover changes on its runoff behavior using the distributed hydrological model HEC-HMS. The study area for this research is a small peri-urban watershed in the eastern area of Santiago de Chile.

Three spatially explicit exploratory land-use/land-cover scenario alternatives were developed based on the analysis of previous land-use developments using high resolution satellite data, on the analysis of urban planning laws, on the analysis of climate change predictions, and on expert interviews. Modeling the resulting changes in runoff allows making predictions about the changes in flood hazard which the adjacent urban areas are facing after heavy winter precipitation events. The paper shows how HEC-HMS was used applying a distributed event modeling approach. The derived runoff values are combined with existing flood hazard maps and can be regarded as important source of information for the adaptation to changing conditions in the study area. The most significant finding is that the land-use changes that have to be expected after long drought periods pose the highest risk with respect to floods.