Flood risk management for cultural heritage through building-scale inundation and vulnerability modelling

Flooding is among the most common natural hazard affecting cultural heritage, yet existing flood hazard assessments are typically carried out at broad urban or regional scales. This research presents a high-resolution, two-dimensional modeling framework at the individual-building scale that captures the complex hydrodynamics occurring inside heritage structures. In contrast to conventional methods that depend on flood depth information from large- or urban-scale inundation models, the proposed approach directly integrates detailed architectural and structural features, including basements, openings, irregular floor elevations, and internal layouts, to more realistically simulate the movement of water within buildings. Moreover, exposure and vulnerability of artworks are considered to provide management guidelines for flood mitigation. The framework is applied to the Marini Museum in Florence, Italy, using an offline-coupled hydraulic model linked to a 2D urban flood model to reproduce water entry, interior flow dynamics, and the influence of mitigation strategies. Different types of exhibited artworks are considered for supporting the museum manager in finding the most appropriate exhibition spaces. Findings show that urban-scale flood maps considerably overestimate water depths inside buildings, while the building-scale model successfully represents the spatial variability of inundation across exhibition spaces. Working at this fine spatial resolution offers a stronger basis for evaluating, managing, and adapting to flood risk affecting heritage structures.