Russell Blessing

Lipai Huang, Federico Antolini, Ali Mostafavi et al.

High-resolution flood probability maps are instrumental for assessing flood risk but are often limited by the availability of historical data. Additionally, producing simulated data needed for creating probabilistic flood maps using physics-based models involves significant computation and time effort, which inhibit its feasibility. To address this gap, this study introduces Precipitation-Flood Depth Generative Pipeline, a novel methodology that leverages generative machine learning to generate large-scale synthetic inundation data to produce probabilistic flood maps. With a focus on Harris County, Texas, Precipitation-Flood Depth Generative Pipeline begins with training a cell-wise depth estimator using a number of precipitation-flood events model with a physics-based model. This cell-wise depth estimator, which emphasizes precipitation-based features, outperforms universal models. Subsequently, the Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CTGAN) is used to conditionally generate synthetic precipitation point cloud, which are filtered using strategic thresholds to align with realistic precipitation patterns. Hence, a precipitation feature pool is constructed for each cell, enabling strategic sampling and the generation of synthetic precipitation events. After generating 10,000 synthetic events, flood probability maps are created for various inundation depths. Validation using similarity and correlation metrics confirms the accuracy of the synthetic depth distributions. The Precipitation-Flood Depth Generative Pipeline provides a scalable solution to generate synthetic flood depth data needed for high-resolution flood probability maps, which can enhance flood mitigation planning.

Faxi Yuan, William Mobley, Hamed Farahmand et al.

The objective of this study is to predict road flooding risks based on topographic, hydrologic, and temporal precipitation features using machine learning models. Predictive flood monitoring of road network flooding status plays an essential role in community hazard mitigation, preparedness, and response activities. Existing studies related to the estimation of road inundations either lack observed road inundation data for model validations or focus mainly on road inundation exposure assessment based on flood maps. This study addresses this limitation by using crowdsourced and fine-grained traffic data as an indicator of road inundation, and topographic, hydrologic, and temporal precipitation features as predictor variables. Two tree-based machine learning models (random forest and AdaBoost) were then tested and trained for predicting road inundations in the contexts of 2017 Hurricane Harvey and 2019 Tropical Storm Imelda in Harris County, Texas. The findings from Hurricane Harvey indicate that precipitation is the most important feature for predicting road inundation susceptibility, and that topographic features are more essential than hydrologic features for predicting road inundations in both storm cases. The random forest and AdaBoost models had relatively high AUC scores (0.860 and 0.810 for Harvey respectively and 0.790 and 0.720 for Imelda respectively) with the random forest model performing better in both cases. The random forest model showed stable performance for Harvey, while varying significantly for Imelda. This study advances the emerging field of smart flood resilience in terms of predictive flood risk mapping at the road level. For example, such models could help impacted communities and emergency management agencies develop better preparedness and response strategies with improved situational awareness of road inundation likelihood as an extreme weather event unfolds.