[CoUDLabs] Urban Flooding: Houses as reservoir (UF-HOUR)

The present dataset is the result of a collaboration between researchers based in five different universities, made possible by the 

Co-UDlabs project. The work resulting in this dataset is part of Work Packages (WPs) 8 and 9.

WP8 seeks to develop standardized methods to measure the hydraulic and water quality performance of urban drainage technologies, to quantify their resilience and recovery, and to improve their long-term sustainability. The main objectives are:

• To develop consensus on methodologies needed to provide high resolution data to assess the performance of urban drainage technologies.
• To demonstrate how the urban flood resilience and pollution transport/retention properties of urban drainage technologies can be evaluated.
• To demonstrate and propose a methodology for the evaluation of the sustainability of new and emerging urban drainage technologies

These objectives will be addressed through experiments to be performed in the facilities and laboratories of Co-UDlabs partners. All data collected, produced and derived from these experiments  will be openly available in a adequately way to sustain the conclusions achieved and to allow its use by external and internal researchers in the future. This is in line with the main objective of Co-UDlabs of building a collaborative European Urban Drainage innovation community.

The purpose of generating this data is to investigate the effect that stormwater stored in buildings has on the characteristics of an urban pluvial flood.

WP9 is related to Transnational Access (TA) provision. The purpose of the TAs is to give researcher groups access to lab facilities across Europe in order to realize the work planned in the previous WPs. From the experiments performed during the TA period, 53 datasets were created.

Each dataset contains the following files:

• "Voltage.txt", containing the raw output of the ultrasonic and pressure sensors used. The second line of the file contains the channel name of each sensor. The fourth line contains the local starting time of each measurement timeseries. The sixth line specifies the sampling frequency. The rest of the file is the output of the sensors, in volts, as they were indexed in the second line.
• "Voltage_meta.txt", containing metadata about the experiment and measurement setup. The fourth line of this file contains information about the specific scenario simulated. The format of the comments is: " t_wet, roofs, i, t_run, doors, basements". Where: 

  t_wet	time (in minutes) between the last time the platform was wetted and the start of the measurements
  roofs	can take the values " yes roofs" and " no roofs" describing whether or not roofs were used on the buildings
  i	rain intensity (in mm/h)
  t_run	rainfall duration (in seconds)
  doors	can take the values " doors open" and " no doors open" describing whether or not doors were open in at least 1 building
  basements	can take the values " yes basements" and " no basements" describing whether or not the buildings had basements

• "doors.txt",  containing information about which doors were open. This file only exists in datasets were doors were open. See "doors_legend.txt" for more information.

"layout.pdf" contains a CAD of the setup, including the positions and numbers of the houses and sensors.

"doors_legend.txt" is a text file used to understand the information in the "doors.txt" files.

"calibraion.zip" contains three folders, "calibration_ultrasonic", "calibration_pressure" and "calibration_tank". 

"calibration_ultrasonic" contains 6 folders for each sensor. Each of those folders contains the measurement of a known distance with the ultrasonic sensor. The distances are given in "ultrasonic_distances.xlsx".

"calibration_pressure" contains 4 folders for each sensor. Each of those folders contains the measurement of the pressure sensor when the respective house contained water. Between each measurement (d01, d2, d03, d04), 1 litre of water was added in the house.

"calibration_tank" contains 5 folders and a file ("tank.xlsx"). The folders contain measurements of the distance between the sensor and the water level in the volumetric tank. The spreadsheet file contains the readings of the flowmeter attached to the outlet used to add water between measurements.

"csv.zip" contains the csv files with the converted values for each sensor, with uncertainty bounds

In general, the audience who might use data generated or collected in this Work Package 8 of Co-UDlabs project are:

• The Co-UDlabs consortium;
• Research institutions, universities, institutes, training centers across Europe and worldwide;
• Utility managers and other stakeholders of the urban drainage community;
• UDS-related EU projects;
• Private and public investment sector;
• European Commission services, European Agencies, EU and national policy makers.

Open research data from Co-UDlabs will be useful to other researchers to underpin scientific publications by referring to the Co-UDlabs results or by incorporating the Co-UDlabs results in comparative analysis with their own project results.