Flood cascading on critical infrastructure with climate change:A spatial analysis of the extreme weather event in Xinxiang, ChinaXiao-Ling QIN a , Shi-Fu WANG a,b , Meng MENG a,b, *aDepartment of Urban Planning, School of Architecture, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510640, ChinabState Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science, Guangzhou, 510640, ChinaReceived 13 June 2022; revised 29 March 2023; accepted 26 May 2023AbstractFloods caused by extreme weather events and climate change have increased in occurrence and severity all over the world, resulting indevastation and disruption of activities. Researchers and policy practitioners have increasingly paid attention to the role of critical infrastructure(CI) in disaster risk reduction, f l ood resilience and climate change adaptation in terms of its backbone functions in maintaining societal servicesin hazard attacks. The analysed city in this study, Xinxiang (Henan province, China), was affected by an extreme f l ood event that occurred on17e23 July 2021, which caused great socio-economic losses. However, few studies have focused on medium-sized cities and the f l ood cascadingeffects on CI during this event. Therefore, this study explores the damages caused by this f l ooding event with links to CI, such as health services,energy supply stations, shelters and transport facilities (HEST infrastructure). To achieve this, the study f i rst combines RGB (red, green blue)composition and supervised classif i cation for f l ood detection to monitor and map f l ood inundation areas. Second, it manages a multiscenariosimulation and evaluates the cascading effects on HEST infrastructure. Diverse open-source data are employed, including Sentinel-1 syntheticaperture radar (SAR) data and Landsat-8 OIL data, point-of-interest (POI) and OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. The study reveals that this extremef l ood event has profoundly affected croplands and villagers. Due to the revisiting period of Sentinel-1 SAR data, four scenarios are simulated toportray the retreated but ‘omitted’ f l oodwater: Scenario 0 is the f l ood inundation area on 27 July, and Scenarios 1, 2 and 3 are built based on thisinformation with a buffer of 50, 100 and 150 m outwards, respectively. In the four scenarios, as the inundation areas expand, the affected HESTinfrastructure becomes more clustered at the centre of the core study area, indicating that those located in the urban centre are more susceptibleto f l ooding. Furthermore, the affected transport facilities assemble in the north and east of the core study area, implying that transport facilitieslocated in the north and east of the core study area are more susceptible to f l ooding. The verif i cation of the f l ood inundation maps and affectedHEST infrastructure in the scenario simulation support the series method adopted in this study. The f i ndings of this study can be used by f l oodmanagers, urban planners and other decision makers to better understand extreme historic weather events in China, improve f l ood resilience anddecrease the negative impacts of such events on HEST infrastructure.Keywords: Flood cascading effects; Critical infrastructure; Extreme rainstorm event; Flood scenarios1. IntroductionFloods caused by extreme weather events and climatechange have increased in occurrence and severity all over theworld (Aich et al., 2015; Nkeki et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2014;Zhong et al., 2021; Zou et al., 2021), resulting in the devas-tation and disruption of livelihoods, food security andecological systems (Armah et al., 2010; Chen et al., 2020; Lee* Corresponding author. Department of Urban Planning, School of Archi-tecture, South China University of Technology (SCUT), Guangzhou 510640,China.E-mail addresses: off i ce1988@163.com, mmeng@scut.edu.cn (MENGM.).Peer review under responsibility of National Climate Center (ChinaMeteorological Administration).Please cite this article as: QIN, X.-L et al., Flood cascading on critical infrastructure with climate change: A spatial analysis of the extreme weather event inXinxiang, China, Advances in Climate Change Research, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.accre.2023.05.005Available online at www.sciencedirect.comScienceDirectAdvances in Climate Change Research xxx (xxxx) xxxwww.keaipublishing.com/en/journals/accr/+ MODELhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.accre.2023.05.0051674-9278/© 2023 The Authors. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CCBY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
