Soil-based Floodplain Mapping

Flood is the most devastating of all natural disasters, leading to both human fatalities and economic losses worth billions of dollars every year. Flood inundation maps play a key role in mitigating flood related losses by indicating areas that are vulnerable to floods. However, the conventional approach to creating flood maps using hydraulic modeling is resource extensive, and cannot be applied easily in rural data sparse regions in the United States (U.S.). An alternative way to produce floodplain maps is proposed in Sangwan and Merwade (2015), which uses easily accessible gSSURGO soil data to produce floodplain maps for larger regions. This community aims at providing national scale floodplain map for the entire U.S. by implementing [...]