Citation

Zhang J, Huang YF, Munasinghe D, Fang Z, Tsang YP, Cohen S. J. Am. Water Resour. Assoc. 2018; 54(4): 820-833.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, American Water Resources Association, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/1752-1688.12623

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Accurate and timely flood inundation maps serve as crucial information for hydrologists, first-responders, and decision makers of natural disaster management agencies. In this study, two modeling approaches are applied to estimate the inundation area for a large flooding event that occurred in May 2016 in the Brazos River: (1) Height Above the Nearest Drainage combined with National Hydrograph Dataset Plus (NHDPlus-HAND) and (2) International River Interface Cooperative -- Flow and Sediment Transport with Morphological Evolution of Channels (iRIC-FaSTMECH). The inundation extents simulated from these two modeling approaches are then compared against the observed inundation extents derived from a Landsat 8 satellite image. The simulated results from NHDPlus-HAND and iRIC-FaSTMECH show 56% and 70% of overlaps with the observed flood extents, respectively. A modified version of the NHDPlus-HAND model, considering networked catchment behaviors, is also tested with an improved fitness of 67%. This study suggests that NHDPlus-HAND has the potential for real-time continental inundation forecast due to its low computational cost and ease to couple with the National Water Model. Better performance of NHDPlus-HAND can be achieved by considering the inter-catchment flows during extreme riverine flood events. Overall, this study presents a comprehensive examination made of remote sensing compared with HAND-based inundation mapping in a region of complex topography.

Language: en

Keywords

flooding; inundation; iRIC; NHDPlus-HAND; observation; remote sensing; simulation