Abstract

Flood Inundation Mapping Along the Boise River: Aiding Flood Response
Track: Disaster and Emergency Management
Authors: Stefanie Sullivan

The National Weather Service collaborated with the Ada City-County Emergency Management and City of Boise to develop flood inundation maps for enhancing flood risk communications, providing planning assistance for emergency response during flood events, and empowering decision makers with information for mitigating the flood impacts on the Boise River. The team utilized a recent HEC-RAS model in accordance to the NWS Flood Inundation Mapping Guidelines to produce inundation extent shapefiles and depth raster grids for key flow levels. GIS allowed for the inundation maps to be overlaid over high-water marks, infrastructure, buildings, roads and orthoimagery to verify and quality control the maps. The final product was incorporated onto the NWS Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Services (AHPS) webpages. NWS will state the reasons why community emergency managers want maps and in particular, are choosing to develop flood inundation map libraries which are linked to river forecasting, flood warnings, and river observations.