Dirk Eilander

HS Hydrological Sciences

The 2022 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Dirk Eilander for the poster/PICO entitled:

A globally-applicable framework for compound flood risk modeling (Eilander, D.; Ward, P.; Couasnon, A.; Muis, S.; Winsemius, H.; Leijnse, T.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Dirk Eilander is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and hydrologist at Deltares. His research focuses on compound flood risk in coastal deltas from global to local scales as part of a Dutch Research Council (NWO) VIDI project. The aim of the research is to better understand compound flood events and how these affect risk assessments and adaptation.
The presentation evaluates a globally-applicable framework for compound flood risk modeling in deltas. Currently, the co-occurrence and dependence of different flood drivers in coastal deltas are not accounted for in global flood risk assessments, while extreme water levels in ~20% of coastal deltas globally are the result of compound surge and discharge drivers. The newly developed framework has been used to assess the drivers of historical flood events and perform a compound flood risk assessment for a case study in Mozambique. Results indicate that compound effect of flood drivers vary largely between events because of the differences in time between and duration of each driver. Flood risk increases when accounting for the observed dependence between flood drivers compared to independence. Since the model setup and coupling is automated, reproducible, and globally-applicable, the framework offers a way forward towards large scale compound flood risk modelling.