Coupled Use of Hydrologic-Hydraulic Model and Geomorphological Descriptors for Flood-Prone Areas Evaluation: A Case Study of Lama Lamasinata

The delineation of flood risk maps is a fundamental step in planning urban areas management. This evaluation can be carried out by hydraulic/hydrological modelling that allows obtaining water depths and related flooded areas. In this way, it is possible to mitigate and contain the catastrophic effects of floods, which become more frequent in the last decades. These events result in losses of both human lives and assets. In addition, the growing availability of high-resolution topographic data (i.e. Digital Terrain Models - DTM), due to new technologies for measuring surface elevation, gave a strong impulse to the development of new techniques capable of providing rapid and reliable identification of flood susceptibility. In this study, two methodologies for mapping flood-prone areas in karst ephemeral streams in Puglia region (Southern Italy) are compared, highlighting how DTM-based technologies are a precious source of information in data-poor environments. Results are in perfect agreement with previous studies on similar areas, showing the marked influences of topography in defining flood-prone areas. These researches can also be useful in investigating a wider gamma of hydrological-related aspects, in particular with respect to the social behavior of communities.