FlowDB a large scale precipitation, river, and flash flood dataset
This dataset addresses the lack of combined hourly precipitation and river flow data, which is crucial for improving flood forecasting and damage estimation, benefiting communities and emergency services impacted by the 8 billion dollars in annual flood damage in the US.
The authors introduce FlowDB, a novel dataset containing hourly precipitation and river flow data, along with a subset of flash flood events with damage estimates and injury counts. This dataset enables two challenges: general stream flow forecasting and flash flood damage estimation, with several publicly available benchmarks.
Flooding results in 8 billion dollars of damage annually in the US and causes the most deaths of any weather related event. Due to climate change scientists expect more heavy precipitation events in the future. However, no current datasets exist that contain both hourly precipitation and river flow data. We introduce a novel hourly river flow and precipitation dataset and a second subset of flash flood events with damage estimates and injury counts. Using these datasets we create two challenges (1) general stream flow forecasting and (2) flash flood damage estimation. We have created several publicly available benchmarks and an easy to use package. Additionally, in the future we aim to augment our dataset with snow pack data and soil index moisture data to improve predictions.