Map-First Climate-Informed Flood Assessment for Data-Scarce Basins • floodflow

floodflow is a map-first, climate-informed workflow for flood hazard assessment in data-scarce basins. It chains rainfall extreme-value analysis, rainfall–runoff simulation, terrain-based flow routing and water-depth estimation into a single reproducible pipeline, built around one project object that accumulates data and results as it flows through the stages.

It is designed for teaching as much as for research: a companion floodflow manual explains every concept, derives the equations, and includes worked exercises, using the June 2026 Accra floods as a running case study.

Installation

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("gowusu/floodflow")

The core is pure R. Optional engines (terra, airGR, extRemes, ranger, whitebox, tmap) add power to individual stages and are loaded only when needed; if one is missing, the relevant function tells you which package to install rather than failing obscurely.

Quick start

A flood depth from a rainfall record in six lines:

library(floodflow)

fp <- flood_project("test")
fp$rainfall <- data.frame(date = Sys.Date() + 0:10,
                          precip_mm = c(0,0,0,20,50,30,10,0,0,0,0))
fp <- flood_runoff(fp, lat_deg = 5.6)
fp <- flood_route(fp, width = 25, slope = 0.002, area_km2 = 400)
fp$route$peak_depth_m        # ~2.07 m

Pipeline

flood_project()      # create the project (ingest DEM + rainfall)
flood_extremes()     # fit stationary/non-stationary GEV; test for a trend
flood_scenario()     # trend / delta / CMIP6 climate-adjusted design event
roughness()          # Manning's n: constant, land cover, or NDVI
flood_runoff()       # rainfall -> discharge
flood_route()        # manning-normal / kinematic / diffusive / muskingum-cunge / dynamic
flood_hydraulics()   # velocity, time of concentration, travel time
flood_uncertainty()  # GLUE ensemble and inverse calibration
flood_vulnerability()# hazard x exposure x vulnerability
flood_surrogate()    # fast machine-learning emulator
flood_map()          # interactive and side-by-side maps

Design principles

Map-first. Every stage returns something that can be rendered as a map: discharge, velocity, travel time, depth and risk.
Climate as a toggle. Any flood scenario can be produced for a present-day or a climate-adjusted design event, side by side.
Built for scarce data. Defaults use satellite or reanalysis rainfall, temperature-based evapotranspiration, and regional pooling of short records.
Honest about limits. The dynamic routing method is a stable 1-D approximation, not full 2-D hydrodynamics; the simple runoff model is a mass-conserving translator, not a calibrated GR4J. These are stated, not hidden.

Documentation

Manual (PDF) — 30-page teaching guide with theory boxes, worked equations, exercises, and a spatial-mapping walkthrough.
Documentation site — function reference and vignettes rendered as web pages.
Getting-started guide — the full scenario matrix.
Package help: ?flood_route, example(flood_route), and browseVignettes("floodflow") after installation.

Status

Version 0.1.0. All pipeline stages are implemented and tested (200+ internal checks). The core is pure R; geospatial and modelling engines are optional and skip-guarded. External validation against gauged catchments is the focus of the v0.2 roadmap.

Citing floodflow

Owusu, G. (2026). floodflow: Climate-informed flood modelling in R. Version 0.1.0. Department of Geography and Resource Development, University of Ghana.

floodflow