Assess Flooding Impacts in Urban Environment: Integrating Fluid-Dynamic Simulations in Smart City Digital Twin

In recent years, climate change has led to a significant increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Among them, floodings represent one of the most critical and dramatic events that can produce casualties and huge damage in urban environments. Therefore, the development of effective tools for the prevention and management of hydrological risks is of paramount importance. In this context, the simulation of flood scenarios and their visualization represent fundamental support tools for decision makers and urban planners to assess risks and identify countermeasures. For these reasons, in this paper, a fluid-dynamic simulation engine integrated into the Snap4City Digital Twin platform is proposed, and, to allow users to observe the results, simulation outputs are encoded as an animated heatmap and visualized on interactive 3D dashboards. Experimental studies comparing the simulation results with the measurements of the 1966 historical flood of Florence, Italy, confirm the validity of the proposed approach.