Flood Potential Portal: Flood Magnitude Prediction and Climate Monitoring Tool

A new release of the Flood Potential Portal is available for hydrologists, floodplain managers, and civil engineers!

This decision support system provides comprehensive understanding of flood risk, for infrastructure design and floodplain management, through presentation of results of the flood potential method alongside the results of traditional riverine flood analysis methodologies. The current analysis extent (see header) is the Western and Southeastern portions of the contiguous United States. (The development within the Northeastern United States is ongoing.) The purpose of this tool is to help professionals understand how floods vary in space and time (from continental to catchment scales), to explore how floods differ across regions and are changing over time, and to facilitate the prediction of flood magnitudes at points of interest (such as road-stream crossings) using multiple methodologies, for simpler and more informed decision making.?

The Flood Potential Portal includes multiple flood potential metrics and summarizes trends in the frequency and magnitude of large floods. For watershed analyses, side-by-side presentation of multiple flood assessment methods, including flood potential, index flood, and USGS regional regressions (StreamStats), allows for seamless, simultaneous comparisons. The use of multiple analysis methods for informing the selection of flood discharges for floodplain planning and infrastructure design provides redundancies that mitigate shortcomings present with each analysis method. Examples are provided in the User Manual to illustrate best practices for utilizing the results of multiple methods, for a well-informed design flood discharge value. Additionally, the Portal facilitates increased stakeholder engagement by making assessments more accessible. Use of the Flood Potential Portal can lead to greater understanding of floods, and how these floods are changing due to climate change and other nonstationarity mechanisms; use of the Portal can contribute to the objective of improved societal resilience to riverine flood hazards.

#floods #hydrology #infrastructure #floodplains #climatechange #resilience