Less is Flow: How Sparse Sensing Rethinks Urban Flood Monitoring
Opening — Why this matters now Urban flooding is no longer a freak event; it’s the new baseline. As climate change deepens rainfall extremes and cities sprawl into impermeable jungles, drainage systems once built for occasional downpours now drown in routine storms. Governments are spending billions on resilience, but the bottleneck isn’t concrete—it’s data. To manage what you can’t measure is to invite disaster. Flood monitoring has traditionally relied on either a scatter of costly ground sensors or fuzzy satellite imagery. Both have blind spots: gauges are sparse, satellites are obstructed. Enter the question that animates a new line of research from the University of Minnesota Duluth: what if we could reconstruct the whole system’s behavior with only a handful of sensors, placed precisely where they matter most? ...