Comparative Analysis of Inundation Mapping Approaches for the 2016 Flood in the Brazos River, Texas

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.

River Channel Geometry and Rating Curve Estimation Using Height above the Nearest Drainage

“…; Zhang et al. ). Esri has integrated different components of our workflow into the latest ArcHydro toolbox.…”

“…Our method has attracted interest from the community, industry, and government agencies. Starting with the 2016 National Flood Interoperability Experiment, researchers have been working extensively to test the performance of our inundation approach against other methods (Afshari et al 2018;Zhang et al 2018). Esri has integrated different components of our workflow into the latest ArcHydro toolbox.…”

Intercomparison of Satellite Remote Sensing‐Based Flood Inundation Mapping Techniques

“…This outcome is understandable in that the sample pixels of flood water are selected based on user knowledge. Zhang et al (2018) used this output for comparing two hydraulic models for the same study area. One might wonder why the spectral indices did not perform better than the supervised classification since water pixel extraction in these two methods is purely based on reflectance values, and intuitive thought would suggest that reflectance-based feature class clustering might be more successful.…”

Featured Collection Introduction: National Water Model

“…Zhang et al. () demonstrated the value of using observed (i.e., remote sensing‐based) flood inundation for model comparison. The paper by Munasinghe et al.…”

“…This framework is envisioned to enhance the communication capabilities of NWM predictions. The paper by Zhang et al (2018) presents the results of a comparative analysis of inundation mapping approaches for the 2016 flood on the Brazos River in Texas. They compared the simple terrain-based HAND approach against the iRIC-FaS-TMECH model.…”