Flood Potential Portal: Understanding Variability and Predicting Peak Discharges for Design and Management

Release of Flood Potential Portal v2.1 & Supporting Journal Article

• Version 2.1 of the Flood Potential Portal (FPP) has been released, which includes refinements of various features of the FPP as well as the addition of the Bulletin 17C streamgage flood-frequency analysis procedure.
• The journal article Flood Potential Portal: A Web Tool for Understanding Flood Variability and Predicting Peak Discharges has been published in River Research and Applications (available as Open Access). This article documents features available in the FPP and is a key citation to be utilized by practitioners in their project reports.
• This ongoing project is a collaboration between One Water Solutions Institute (Colorado State University) and the National Stream and Aquatic Ecology Center (U.S. Forest Service). The Federal Highway Administration has recently joined the collaboration, providing funding for research into advanced science-guided ensemble machine learning to improve forecasting of temporal trends in large floods, and ensemble modeling for streamgage flood-frequency analyses.

Journal Article Abstract:

The Flood Potential Portal (https://floodpotential.erams.com/) 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 Analysis 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 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 more than 8200 streamgages with watershed areas <10,000 km2. Regression models that define each zone had high explained variance (average R2 = 0.93). An example is provided to illustrate use of the Flood Potential Portal for the design of a hypothetical bridge replacement.

#floods #infrastructure #floodplains #infrastructure #climatechange