United States Federal Emergency Management Agency provides model-output
localized flood grids that are useful in characterizing flood hazards
for properties located in the Special Flood Hazard Area (SFHA ─ areas
expected to experience a 1% or greater annual chance of flooding). But
these flood grids are often unavailable or fail to include return
periods for particular applications, such as understanding flood risk of
properties during the 70-year useful building life cycle. Furthermore,
due to the unavailability of higher-return-period flood grids, the flood
risk of properties located outside the SFHA cannot be quantified. Here,
we present a method to estimate the flood hazard for U.S. properties
that are located both inside and outside the SFHA. The flood hazard is
characterized by the Gumbel extreme value distribution to project flood
elevations to extreme flood events for which an entire area is assumed
to be submerged. Spatial interpolation techniques impute elevation
values in the extreme flood elevation surfaces and therefore can
estimate the flood hazard for areas outside the SFHA. The proposed
method can improve the assessment of flood risk for properties located
in both inside and outside the SFHA and therefore, the decision-making
process regarding flood insurance purchases, mitigation strategies, and
long-term planning for enhanced resilience to one of the world’s most
ubiquitous natural hazards.
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