Spatial diversion and coordination of flood water for an urban flood control project in Suzhou, China

Suzhou City, located in the Yangtze River Delta in China, is prone to flooding due to a complex combination of natural factors, including its monsoon climate, low elevation, and tidally influenced position, as well as intensive human activities. The Large Encirclement Flood Control Project (LEFCP) was launched to cope with serious floods in the urban area. This project changed the spatiotemporal pattern of flood processes and caused spatial diversion of floods from the urban area to the outskirts of the city. Therefore, this study developed a distributed flood simulation model in order to understand this transition of flood processes. The results revealed that the LEFCP effectively protected the urban areas from floods, but the present scheduling schemes resulted in the spatial diversion of floods to the outskirts of the city. With rainstorm frequencies of 10.0% to 0.5%, the water level differences between two representative water level stations (Miduqiao (MDQ) and Fengqiao (FQ)) located inside and outside the LEFCP area, ranged from 0.75 m to 0.24 m and from 1.80 m to 1.58 m, respectively. In addition, the flood safety margin at MDQ and the duration with the water level exceeding the warning water level at FQ ranged from 0.95 m to 0.43 m and from 4 h to 22 h, respectively. Rational scheduling schemes for the hydraulic facilities of the LEFCP in extreme precipitation cases were developed according to flood simulations under seven scheduling scenarios. This helps to regulate the spatial flood diversion caused by the LEFCP during extreme precipitation.