Rapid Flood Damage Prediction and Forecasting Using Public Domain Cadastral and Address Point Data with Fuzzy Logic Algorithms

Abstract

National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE) derived technologies and workflows will offer the ability to rapidly forecast flood damages. Address Points used by emergency management personnel approximate the locations of buildings, and they are a common operating picture for emergency responders. Most United States (U.S.) county tax assessment offices throughout the contiguous U.S. (CONUS) produce georeferenced cadastral data. To varying degrees, these parcel data describe building characteristics of structures within the parcel. Address Point data with cadastral data offers the ability to rapidly develop building inventories for flood damage estimation. Flood damage forecasts can expedite recovery and improve short-term flood resilience. In this work the authors evaluate Flood Damage Wizard, a proposed open source platform independent methodology. Flood Damage Wizard uses point shapefile building information to estimate flood damage to buildings by finding the appropriate depth-damage function using fuzzy-text matching. The authors apply Flood Damage Wizard using Address Point and parcel datasets to demonstrate a method of estimating flood damage to buildings nearly anywhere within the CONUS. Results indicate using Address Point and cadastral datasets can generate total flood damage estimates approximate to those estimated using existing software solutions Hazus-MH and HEC-FIA with minimal manual processing of input data.(KEY TERMS: risk assessment; planning; flooding; geospatial analysis; damage assessment; open source software; rapid damage assessment.)

An Overview of Flood Risk Analysis Methods

“…The research was mainly focused on the following three major regions: Continental Europe [22][23][24][25][26] with about 40% of articles, Asia with 28% [27][28][29][30][31], and North America with 20% [32][33][34][35][36]. South America (5%) [37][38][39][40][41] and Africa (4%) [42][43][44][45][46] showed less research interest (Figure 2).…”

Integrating Societal and Scientific Elements into Sustainable and Effective Water Resource Policy Development

“…These production-ready tools provide water resource allocation and management decision support capacity, along with core functionality that permits engagement of stakeholders in scenario evaluation processes. Water Wizard (Gutenson et al, 2018) is a suite of expert system tools that embrace the WRISPR philosophy and are developed specifically to perform analytical and decision support functions on raw hydrologic and water quality data. Many of these tools integrate off-the-shelf tool-chains, such as the Python Knowledge Engine (PyKE) (Sourceforge, 2009), to rapidly integrate Subject Matter Expertise into applications and web platforms such as GeoNode (GeoNode, 2012) for rapid deployment of geospatially augmented web content.…”

Featured Collection Introduction: National Flood Interoperability Experiment II

“…Gutenson et al . () took the idea of using flood maps a step further by showing flood damage can be estimated by combining flood maps with infrastructure and damage curves associated with geographic point and polygon features. Such features can be mapped on the inundation boundaries and then the overall damage can be assessed using the appropriate damage curve.…”

“…In their contribution to the featured collection, Selvanathan et al (2017) presented a framework for developing flood maps from hydraulic models that form a part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's database that include incorporation of climate change scenarios in order to evaluate resiliency. Gutenson et al (2017) took the idea of using flood maps a step further by showing flood damage can be estimated by combining flood maps with infrastructure and damage curves associated with geographic point and polygon features. Such features can be mapped on the inundation boundaries and then the overall damage can be assessed using the appropriate damage curve.…”