Flooding can have a serious impact on life and property, and emergency management officials are increasingly turning to technology to map and predict these events, especially in often-stricken areas. The ability to marshal resources to specific communities often rely on these inundation estimates.
Kansas Water Office and Kansas Division of Emergency Management, who dealt with extreme flooding in 2007, turned to Kansas University academics, when heavy rain affected the region this year. Jude Kastens, an associate research professor with the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing Program at the Kansas Biological Survey, used data from elevation maps, stream gauges and National Weather Service river stage forecasts to predict flooding. “The ground was saturated, and the reservoirs were getting full, and with a lot more rain in the forecast, major flooding across central and eastern Kansas was looking imminent,” Kastens said in a release provided to Science Daily. “Some years ago, we’d developed this inundation library largely in collaboration with the Water Office and the Kansas GIS Policy Board but had never had the chance to put it through its paces in real time.”
Based on Kastens’ PhD dissertation and the research he developed, he used flood libraries of data based on the gauged stream network that collects real time information and provides it to the National Weather Service to provide flooding forecasts. Kastens’ model, FLDPLN, or “Floodplain”, uses this data to estimate current or future flooding at these gauge sites. “Because the approach requires so few inputs and little supervision, it has significant advantages for real-time mapping over existing methods such as the more precise but more complicated hydrodynamic models that FEMA uses to map 100-year floodplains,” according to Kastens in the article.
He hopes to streamline the process through automation for future disasters, and is working with Riverside Technology Inc. to commercialize and increase the reach of the program to emergency management outside of Kansas. “Time is of the essence during major flood events. We need to develop software tools to help automate the mapping process and hand it off to these other agencies so they have the freedom to map whichever scenarios they want,” he said.
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190726214739.htm
