It's not just the river that floods
Developing compound flood maps to assess neighborhood-scale risk
Why Now?
Flood maps are typically produced as boundaries that show where flooding is or is not expected during a weather event (e.g., a specific river flood). These “binary floodplain maps” do not accurately represent the conditions in Southeast Texas. For instance, flooding in Southeast Texas can result from multiple drivers (e.g. river flooding, coastal flooding, and intense rainfall) creating substantial uncertainty. Traditional binary floodplain maps do not communicate this uncertainty, limiting their usefulness for neighborhood-level planning, infrastructure design, and risk communication.
What We Did
The SETx-UIFL developed a framework to produce probabilistic, high-resolution flooding and applied it to the Village Creek watershed in Southeast Texas. The research team simulated 5,000 storm events within the Advanced Terrestrial Simulator (ATS), a fully distributed hydrologic model. The research team then combined the flood results across the flood scenarios to estimate the probability of flooding across a 1 m-grid resolution.
Who Was Involved?
This work builds upon local knowledge about flooding-problem areas in the Village Creek watershed, which was selected due to its history of severe flooding and the presence of communities like Woodville, Ivanhoe, and Wildwood. The results have a fine enough resolution to support insights about block-level flooding (e.g., what is the probability of flooding at this driveway or at this structure)?