FloodCitiSense aims at developing an urban pluvial flood early warning service for, but also by citizens and city authorities, building upon the state-of-the-art knowledge, methodologies and smart technologies provided by research units and private companies. FloodCitiSense targets the co-creation of this innovative public service in an urban living lab context with all local actors. This service will reduce the vulnerability of urban areas and citizens to pluvial floods, which occur when heavy rainfall exceeds the capacity of the urban drainage system. Due to their fast onset and localized nature, they cause significant damage to the urban environment and are challenging to manage. Monitoring and management of peak events in cities is typically in the hands of local governmental agencies. Citizens most often just play a passive role as people negatively affected by the flooding, despite the fact that they are often the ‘first responders’ and should therefore be actively involved. The FloodCitiSense project aims at integrating crowdsourced hydrological data, collaboratively monitored by local stakeholders, including citizens, making use of low-cost sensors and web-based technologies, into a flood early warning system. This will enable ‘citizens and cities’ to be better prepared for and better respond to urban pluvial floods. Three European pilot cities are targeted: Brussels – Belgium, Rotterdam – The Netherlands and Birmingham – UK.

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Urban hydrological applications require high resolution precipitation and catchment information in order to well represent the spatial variability, fast runoff processes and short response times of urban catchments (Berne et al., 2004). Although fast progress has been made over the last few decades in high resolution measurement of rainfall at urban scales, including increasing use of weather radars, recent studies suggest that the resolution of the currently available rainfall estimates (typically 1 × 1 km2 in space and 5 min in time) may still be too coarse to meet the stringent requirements of urban hydrology (Gires et al., 2012). What is more, current evidence is still insufficient to provide a concrete answer regarding the added value of higher resolution rainfall estimates and actual rainfall input resolution requirements for urban hydrological applications. With the aim of providing further evidence in this regard, a collaborative study was conducted which investigated the impact of rainfall input resolutions on the outputs of the operational urban drainage models of four urban catchments in the UK and Belgium (Figure 1).@en