Forecast Flood Inundation Mapping at Continental Scale from National
Water Model River Discharges
Abstract
The National Water Center (NWC), part of the National Weather Service’s
(NWS) Office of Water Prediction (OWP), seeks to provide forecast flood
inundation maps (FIM) as services at the national scale along 2.7+
million river reaches. The National Water Model (NWM) forecasts stream
discharges along these reaches at varying time horizons. Building on the
methodology of previous versions, OWP FIM 3.0 seeks to map NWM stream
discharges to inundation extents with a modified version of the Height
Above Nearest Drainage method for mapping stages. FIM 3.0 produces
required datasets for generation of FIMs, which are relative elevations,
reach-level catchments, rating curves and crosswalk tables, to convert
the NWM discharge forecasts to inundation extents as a post-processing
step. Computational tests estimate that producing these FIM required
datasets for the continental U.S. will be around 600 total CPU hours.
Only publicly available input datasets from the NWM or NHDPlusHR are
required. The latest methods leveraged within FIM 3.0 include the use of
consistent reach lengths and deriving FIM outputs at lower stream
densities (downstream of River Forecast Center forecast points) to
mitigate catchment boundary limitations. FIM 3.0 is primarily
parallelized across Hydrologic Unit Codes (HUC) 4, 6, or 8 as processing
units which can be selected by the user at run time. FIM capability
improvements were measured by comparisons to engineering scale maps
using contingency statistics. Future versions will support NWM
geospatial dataset production, usage of Lidar elevations, and more
advanced hydrological methods. FIM 3.0 is highly configurable, modular,
and portable due to its software architecture and containerization. All
software dependencies are open-source including GDAL/OGR, TauDEM, and
RichDEM. The source code and Docker container are expected to be made
available publicly for community review and development.