Flood Forecast Alerting Based on NOAA’s National Water Model

Originally presented at StormCon 2022 on September 28, 2022, 10:45-11:15 AM

In 2018, Wood kicked-off a project with the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE), Maryland Environmental Service (MES), and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to research the use of NOAA’s National Water Model (NWM) for riverine flood forecasting. The National Water Model (NWM) “is a hydrologic model that simulates observed and forecast streamflow over the entire continental United States (CONUS),” based on the National Hydrography Dataset (NHDPlusV2) stream network of approximately 2.7 million stream reaches. We coupled the NWM data with FEMA Risk MAP HEC-RAS models to build a pilot system for flood forecast alerting and inundation mapping. Using lessons learned from that pilot, our Wood project team was successful in winning internal R&D funding through a CoLab Challenge to build a more robust solution. The new project is a web application that brings the alerting and mapping into a single platform. This presentation will provide a brief background on the NWM, share key insights we’ve learned from this project, and talk about future enhancements that are planned.

Presented by:

Kristine Mosuela – Wood PLC