The hydrological-hydraulic modeling to support, on the one hand, the definition of flood hazard and risk scenarios useful for testing project hypotheses or to evaluate future changes and, on the other, the short-term prediction and warning of flood events and their consequences, represents an essential tool for preventing and/or limiting the extent of causal damage from extreme rainfall events by providing information on the propagation of the flood phenomenon, on its characteristics and on the critical issues found in the area in question.

The aim of this research work is the evaluation of flood event scenarios and their spatial-temporal evolution at the mouth of the Basento Basin in Basilicata (Italy), where several calamitous events occurred whose damage severely affected the floodplain areas. The definition of maps relating to event scenarios is carried out using hydrological and hydraulic models, appropriately calibrated and validated using historical data in combination with an optimization process based on genetic algorithms and using multi-temporal SAR data relating to past events.

In particular, the cascade use of a lumped physically based rainfall-runoff hydrological model named AD2 (Manfreda et al., 2018) for the estimation of flood hydrographs and of a two-dimensional hydraulic model called FLORA2D Cantisani et al., 2014) allowed the estimation of hydraulic characteristics, such as, for example, the extension of the flood and the envelope of the maximum water depth.