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Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology

NOAA HAND-FIM Workshop

Hands on training NOAA-OWP Operational HAND-FIM

Day 2 Session 2 (1:30 PM MDT)

Presenters:

Anupal Baruah
The University of Alabama

Pranav Sundararajan
The University of Alabama

Carson Pruitt
NOAA Office of Water Prediction

The baseline flood estimation method employed by the National Water Center (NWC) FIM services is based upon the Height Above Nearest Drainage (HAND) method at HUC-8 scale. As explained by Zheng et al. (2018) and Liu et al. (2018), HAND is a geoprocessing technique that converts a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) to a Relative Elevation Model (REM) depicting the elevation of the surrounding terrain above the river to which it drains. The NWC FIM services implementation of HAND relies upon a hydrographic network, such as the NHDPlus, to define the local drainage (https://github.com/NOAA-OWP/inundation-mapping/wiki/3.-HAND-Methodology).Finaly, REMs are used in conjunctions with the NWM retrospective streamflow data to generate the flood maps for single and multiple events.

For additional information, email abarauh@ua.edu.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Interaction with AWS Buckets and Docker containers: Participants will discover how to retrieve input datasets from AWS buckets. They will become more adept at configuring Docker containers for HAND FIM.
  • Preparing Retrospective Streamflow Data: Acquire the knowledge of downloading National Water Model (NWM) retrospective streamflow datasets and learn how to prepare datasets for HAND-FIM.
  • Flood Inundation Mapping: Using the given datasets, participants will be adept at creating flood maps for various locations of interest.

Prerequisites:

Knowledge:

  • Basic knowledge of hydrology, flood inundation maps, streamflow, and digital elevation model.

Software: