Abstract: In view of the severe situation of urban flooding in China and the development of previous flood simulation models, this paper points out that refining urban flood simulations is a focus in the future studies. Data acquisition methods based on the low-altitude UAV-based photogrammetry can provide high-resolution ground information such as flooded areas in a city, helping build complete databases. By summarizing typical technical indicators and application of this new technology, we demonstrate that it has the advantage of low cost in acquisition of easily updated large-scale data and hence is widely applied in numerous fields. And it also makes it easier to develop or refine flood simulation models through collecting data of landuse, topography, and flooded area, among others. In addition, technologies like three-dimensional modeling and monomer modeling can serve the purpose of better digitalization and refinement of flooding process simulations and result display. Although problems still remain in the application of photogrammetry technology to flooding simulation, it should have a good application prospect as it is improved and further developed in future.

Key words: UAV, photogrammetry, high resolution, refining, urban flooding, simulation