New Flood Magnitude Prediction and Climate Monitoring Tool: Flood Potential Portal

We are pleased to announce the release of the Flood Potential Portal, a new tool for understanding and communicating about flood hazards, predicting flood magnitudes at user-selected points of interest, and monitoring of climate change impacts on large floods. The tool is available at: https://floodpotential.erams.com/?

The current available extent is the western 2/3’s of the contiguous United States, from the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi River. The extent will be expanded to the southeast United States (south of the Ohio and Potomac Rivers) in March of 2023, with the northeast expansion a year later.?

Executive Summary:

Riverine floods are a leading environmental threat to life, infrastructure, and property. Climate change is expected to change these threats in some areas. To maximize resilience, it is essential that enhanced understanding of riverine flood hazards be developed and made readily available to hydrologic professionals, to be incorporated into decision making for floodplain management and infrastructure design.?

The Flood Potential Portal was developed to assist practitioners with developing such enhanced understanding, using both traditional and new techniques that leverage the power of more than a century of streamgaging efforts in the United States. The U.S. Forest Service’s National Stream and Aquatic Ecology Center (NSAEC) collaborated with researchers and staff at Colorado State University’s One Water Solutions Institute (OWSI) to develop a decision support system that presents the results of the flood potential method (Yochum et al., 2019) alongside the results of traditional riverine flood analysis methodologies. The intent 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 predict flood magnitudes at points of interest using multiple methodologies. Additionally, the stationarity assumption for streamgage analyses is tested and adjustments applied where trends in flood magnitudes are detected, with additional trend testing for flood frequency and flashiness performed; the Portal provides tools to test and account for observed changes in large floods due to climate change.?

The Flood Potential Portal is a Catena Analytics-based web-tool. Catena Analytics offers powerful platforms for building accessible and scalable analytical tools and simulation models that can be accessed through web browsers on desktop or mobile devices. Since 2010 the OWSI team has been developing the Environmental Resource Assessment and Management System (eRAMS), an open-source technology that provides cloud-based geospatially-enabled software solutions as online services and a platform for collaboration, development, and deployment of online tools. The eRAMS web-based GIS framework, in combination with the Cloud Services Integration Platform (CSIP) framework, is used for developing, deploying, and supporting model and data RESTful web services, as the foundation of the Catena Analytics platform. These services are used to assist with strategic and tactical decision making for sustainable management of land, water, and energy resources.?

The 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. 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 may be changing due to climate change; use of the Portal can contribute to the objective of improved societal resilience to flood hazards.