DELUGE: Towards Continental-Scale Daily Pluvial Flood Damage Prediction via Interpretable Conditioning on Foundation Model Embeddings

Near-real-time flood depth prediction demands surrogate models that are accurate, fast, and transferable across watersheds. Supervised surrogates can match physics-based simulators in accuracy but need millions of training rows per watershed and cannot extrapolate beyond their original mesh. We propose a domain-aware coreset construction pipeline that conditions a tabular foundation model at inference time. The pipeline stratifies storms by return period and most-affected watershed, then samples hexagons with a target-aware spatial selector. With 0.7% of the per-watershed training pool, the model attains a mean $R^2$ of 0.663 across nine Houston-area watersheds, within 98.5% of the supervised reference ($R^2$ = 0.673). It transfers to held-out watersheds without task-specific retraining, staying ahead of a coreset-trained supervised baseline. On real storms it exceeds the supervised reference on a far out-of-distribution case and trails it on a mostly in-distribution one. Domain-aware coreset construction lets tabular foundation models deliver data-efficient, watershed-transferable flood predictions without per-watershed training.

Deep learning surrogate models trained with mean-squared-error loss produce statistically accurate but physically unconstrained flood predictions: water may flow uphill, appear spontaneously, or smooth over street-level corridors. We develop a physics-informed training framework for CNN-LSTM models that predict urban flood depths at 15 min intervals over a 128x128 spatial grid. Three differentiable penalty terms are embedded into the loss: (i) a gravity loss penalizing depth increases against the water-surface-elevation gradient, (ii) a continuity loss enforcing local mass conservation with rainfall-adaptive thresholds, and (iii) a topography-aware false-alarm penalty modulated by the topographic wetness index (TWI). We evaluate on the Norfolk, Virginia flood dataset spanning two storm events (August 2017 and September 2022, 300 samples), with all variants trained on identical splits and robustness assessed over repeated random splits and leave-one-storm-out tests. A road-proximal evaluation restricted to a TWI-derived street mask quantifies street-level skill. The physics-constrained model achieves near-zero gravity violations (order 1e-6) and the highest street-channel recall (0.77 +/- 0.09 vs 0.44 +/- 0.10 for the unconstrained baseline), the capability most relevant to traffic routing, and its advantage more than doubles on a held-out storm; a uniform false-alarm variant attains 16% lower mean absolute error but suppresses street recall to 0.25. The TWI-modulated penalty reconciles this trade-off: it improves on the uniform variant on every metric, recovering 60% higher street recall at the lowest MAE among constrained variants and the best street-level F1. These results expose a fundamental tension between aggregate pixel-level error and application-specific physical plausibility, and show that terrain-aware loss modulation offers a principled resolution.

AI-driven flood digital twins demand fast hydrodynamic surrogates for ensemble forecasting and observation assimilation. Yet even GPU-accelerated two-dimensional shallow water equation (SWE) solvers still require $\sim 55$ minutes per $96$-hour run on a $\sim 4.2$-million-active-cell metropolitan basin (the DesPlaines River basin at $30\,\mathrm{m}$ resolution), making such workloads prohibitive at native resolution. We present the Conditional Latent Dynamics Network (CLDNet): a low-dimensional latent neural ODE driven by rainfall, paired with a coordinate-based decoder conditioned on static terrain (elevation, slope, Manning roughness) that reconstructs depth and discharge at arbitrary query points. Pointwise decoding decouples memory from grid size and handles irregular watersheds natively, enabling metropolitan-scale training on a single compute node and direct queries at exact gauge coordinates without raster snapping. We evaluate CLDNet on a synthetic $250{,}000$-cell Texas benchmark and on a new DesPlaines case study of $114$ real-rainfall StageIV storms whose reference simulator we validate against United States Geological Survey (USGS) gauges at the April2013 flood-of-record (Nash--Sutcliffe efficiency $0.57$--$0.94$ on mean-recentered water-surface elevation). CLDNet roughly halves the relative root-mean-squared error of an unconditional baseline, outperforms regular-grid VAE--ConvLSTM and FNO baselines on the Texas benchmark (both presuppose a Cartesian grid and do not apply to the irregular Des~Plaines watershed), reaches a critical success index of $\approx 86\%$ at the $0.5\,\mathrm{m}$ inundation threshold, and produces a full $96$-hour basin-wide forecast in $\sim 29$ seconds -- a $\sim 115\times$ speedup.