Mountainous megacities face a distinctive form of pluvial waterlogging in which terrain-controlled flow convergence, accelerating imperviousness, and aging drainage interact to produce chronic, spatially clustered failures rather than stochastic events. Existing frameworks, such as hydrodynamic modeling, data-driven machine learning, and multi-criteria composite indexing, carry distinctive failure modes at the municipal scale. This study develops and externally validates a city-wide, grid-based assessment framework for Chongqing, China, through three integrated choices. First, resilience is reformulated as a stabilized adaptation-to-risk ratio and subjected to an explicit falsification test against independent waterlogging observations. Second, multi-source hydroclimatic, topographic–hydrologic, land-cover, and service-accessibility indicators are integrated on a 500 m fishnet (22,500 cells) through within-component CRITIC–Entropy weighting and TOPSIS, with robustness diagnosed by a 500-iteration Monte Carlo weight-perturbation analysis. Third, a spatially grouped LightGBM classifier with SHAP interpretation serves both as an independent validation layer and as a mechanistic lens on non-linear driver thresholds. The composite risk surface achieves ROC-AUC values of 0.834 and 0.873 against two independent waterlogging registries, is strongly spatially clustered (Moran’s I = 0.81, p < 0.001), and preserves its ranking under aggressive weight perturbation (Spearman ρ ≥ 0.95 in 95% of scenarios). A counterintuitive finding emerges from the falsification test as resilience yields ROC-AUC below 0.5 on both point sets, indicating that accessibility-based capacity proxies systematically capture urban centrality rather than drainage robustness, like a diagnosable measurement problem affecting the wider resilience-index literature. LightGBM concentrates 88.0% of waterlogging cells within the top 10% of scored grids, and SHAP-derived thresholds align with saturation-ponding, well-drained, and convergence–hotspot regimes of classical hydrology. Together, these results reframe waterlogging assessment in complex terrain from a cartographic exercise into a falsifiable, resource-aware prioritization framework, and clarify why capacity maps and risk maps should be published as complementary instruments of flood governance.
Yang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.