FLOODSFloodAdapt Will Help Protect Flood-prone Communities
The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has partnered with Deltares USA to conduct demonstrations, trainings, and performance testing for the new accessible compound flood and impact assessment tool, which will help at-risk communities better prepare for and respond to severe weather events.
Our coastal communities have taken a real hit in recent years. With extreme weather events on the rise, learning from past incidents and emerging trends is the key to protecting lives and property. Having the right compound flood modeling systems and data in place to study, simulate, and predict threats makes collaboration and critical decision-making that much easier, so when the time comes, response can be swift.
S&T has been working with Deltares USA and the city of Charleston, South Carolina, for two years to develop and pilot a state-of-the-art suite of community-oriented flood-hazard modeling and impact assessment technologies and software that will soon be available to inform field operations and emergency response before and after any events make landfall. The tools, now collectively known as FloodAdapt, will provide responders, emergency managers, and policy makers in flood-prone communities with capabilities to establish stronger planning and preparation strategies.
“Our efforts in Charleston have played a critical role in the ongoing development of FloodAdapt,” said S&T Program Manager Ron Langhelm. “Thanks to engagement with local emergency managers, first responders, and community decision makers, along with continual performance and user testing, we’ve been able drastically improve upon FloodAdapt’s tools, and enhance their capabilities and scope of use.”
FloodAdapt has unique, user-friendly components that help users create community-specific flood simulations, study related impacts, and investigate the efficacy of potential preventive and mitigative efforts and responses.
SFINCS is an open-source modeling tool that rapidly and dynamically simulates compound flooding events that impact large-scale coastal environments, and calculates interactions between related phenomena such as rainfall, storm surges, and river discharge. Delft-FIAT is an open-source flood impact assessment modeling tool that evaluates flood damage to buildings, utilities, and roads.
FloodAdapt incorporates innovative decision-support features, helping bring them into practice. These include an equity-weighting tool that (optionally) incorporates income data in determining equity-weighted damages and risk, infographics that use social vulnerability data to evaluate the equitable distribution of impacts and benefits, and a benefits calculator to assess the risk-reduction benefits of measures or strategies that will help lessen the impact of future flood events.
