Flood Potential Portal released for the contiguous United States

The Flood Potential Portal, a decision support system for performing watershed analyses, streamgage analyses, and quantifying and communicating about the spatial and temporal variation in floods, has been released for the contiguous United States! The Flood Potential Portal (FPP) was developed as a "one-stop shop" to help practitioners quantify expected flood magnitudes for infrastructure design and floodplain management, including accounting for observed changes in floods due to climate change and other sources of non-stationarity.

https://floodpotential.erams.com/

Available Features:

• Mapping, to view characteristics of floods, including: scale of floods experienced in a zone of interest, and in comparison to other zones; flashiness of the experienced floods; and dominant flooding months (seasonality)
• Mapping, to view eight observed trends in flood magnitudes, frequency, and flashiness over time
• Cross-section analysis, to help understand the role of topography in how floods vary
• Peak flood magnitude prediction using the flood potential method, including adjustments for trends in flood magnitudes due to non-stationarity
• Peak flood magnitude prediction using an index flood-frequency method for flood-frequency prediction, within flood potential zones
• Peak flood magnitude prediction using USGS regional regression analyses for flood-frequency prediction (StreamStats)
• Streamgage flood-frequency analysis, including automated downloads of annual peak discharge data and generalized skew values

Abstract:

The Flood Potential Portal has been developed for the contiguous United States, as a practitioner-focused tool that uses observational data (streamgages) to enhance understanding of how floods vary in space and time, and assist users in making more informed peak discharge predictions for infrastructure design and floodplain management. This capability is presented through several modules. The Mapping module provides tools to explore variability using multiple indices, and provides detailed information, figures, and algorithms describing and comparing flooding characteristics. The Cross-Section module allows users to cut regional-scale sections to interpret the role of topography in driving flood variability. The Watershed Analysis module provides multiple methods (flood potential; index flood frequency; USGS regional regression flood frequency) for quantifying expected peak discharge magnitudes and flood-frequency relationships at user-selected locations, including the integration of observed trends in flood magnitudes due to climate change and other sources of nonstationarity into decision making. The Streamgage Analysis module performs streamgage flood-frequency analyses. These modules are based in part on the flood potential method, through the use of 207 zones of similar flood response defined using 8233 streamgages with watershed areas <10,000 km2. Regression models that define each zone had high explained variance (average R2 = 0.93).