Flood-adjusted accessibility modelling

Understand how flooding changes access to essential places.

FloodAccess is a research-focused modelling tool for analysing how flood events affect access to user-defined destinations, including healthcare, schools, shelters, food supplies, workplaces and infrastructure.

Download coming soon View methodology
GeoTIFFRaster outputs
GPKGVector outputs
QGISPlanned plugin

Overview

Generic access modelling, not limited to healthcare.

FloodAccess is designed to model access from origins to destinations during flood scenarios. Users provide their own data, define what they want to measure access to, and generate GIS-ready outputs.

OriginsVillages, homes, grid cells
DestinationsClinics, schools, depots, shelters
Flood dataDepth, velocity, extent
OutputsMaps, rasters, routes, summaries

About FloodAccess

Evidence-based flood accessibility modelling from research to GIS.

FloodAccess builds on academic research into flood-adjusted accessibility modelling carried out by Elizabeth Mroz. Her work investigates how seasonal flooding affects geographical access to essential services by incorporating flood depth, velocity and extent into accessibility models.

The original research focused on healthcare access in the Barotse Floodplain in Zambia, but FloodAccess aims to generalise the methodology so researchers can model access to any destination type using their own spatial data.

The project is being developed collaboratively by Elizabeth Mroz and George Lawley. Elizabeth provides the research methodology and domain expertise, while George leads software architecture, implementation and the translation of that methodology into a practical GIS tool.

FloodAccess is intended to make advanced flood accessibility modelling more accessible to researchers, planners and resilience professionals.

Features

Built for GIS and academic workflows.

Network accessibility

Model blocked or slowed roads, paths and links using flood depth and velocity rules.

Raster travel-time surfaces

Create flood-adjusted travel-time surfaces for walking and cost-distance analysis.

Flexible destinations

Analyse access to any user-provided destination layer rather than one fixed service type.

Scenario comparison

Compare baseline access against different flood scenarios, thresholds and travel modes.

GIS-ready export

Export GeoTIFF, GeoPackage and CSV outputs for QGIS and wider analysis.

Academic licensing

Planned as free for academic research, teaching and non-commercial use.

Methodology

From flood model to access result.

01

Load spatial data

Flood rasters, origins, destinations, population layers and transport networks.

02

Apply flood rules

Set depth and velocity thresholds, blocked links, reduced speeds and travel modes.

03

Run access model

Calculate reachable destinations, isolated origins, delays and travel-time changes.

04

Export to GIS

Produce GeoTIFF surfaces, GeoPackage layers and CSV summary tables.

Outputs

Designed to drop straight into QGIS.

FloodAccess will prioritise clean, reusable GIS outputs so researchers can continue analysis, cartography and reporting in their existing tools.

accessibility_classification_surface.tif flood_hazard_surface.tif global_impedance_surface.tif road_status.gpkg scenario_summary.csv

Roadmap

Development stages.

0.1Network model prototype
0.2Raster travel-time engine
0.5Scenario comparison tools
1.0QGIS plugin release

Downloads

Academic beta in development.

FloodAccess is not yet available for download. Future releases, documentation and example datasets will be published here.