Interested in obtaining a flood risk report for your address? Scroll to the bottom of the page.
The Flooding Problem
Flooding is an increasingly concerning problem, including in Canada, and are exacerbated by climate change and land use change. Flooding causes billions of dollars in damages each year in Canada, impacting infrastructure, emergency services, and much more. The situation is not helped by the fact that the flood maps relied upon for planning and risk assessment, but also in flood response under emergency conditions, are often decades out of date or not available at all in some parts of the country.
Part of the problem here is that the modelling methods used to create these maps often require expensive engineering studies to accurately delineate flood lines. These types of studies have long planning cycles, and are often only undertaken in small sections of flood prone areas when new developments or other projects are undertaken.
What is Blackbird?
Blackbird is our solution that provides a hydraulic modelling and mapping method which is capable of producing accurate mapping results at large scales while maintaining highly efficient computational speeds. This is achieved based on clever approach and the speed of the methodology itself, not by using supercomputers to speed up runs.
How do we do this? We combine relatively simple geospatial methods used for mapping flooding based on a provided depth, and use the backbone of one-dimensional hydraulic models to power the methodology with industry-standard hydraulic calculations. We introduce some additional clever methods for handling connectivity in floodplains and other magic additions to obtain results that approach the accuracy of two-dimensional models, while using a fraction of the runtime.
This method can be applied to efficiently update flood maps used in landuse planning and risk assessments, and can even be used in tandem with streamflow forecasting to produce on-the-fly inundation maps.
Home Flood Risk Reports
We are investigating applying Blackbird to map overland flood risk, and providing current or prospective property buyers with customized reports on overland flood risk.
If you would be interested in such a product, please click on the button below.