NASA GEO Flash Flood Database

This repository contains a brief overview of the work completed as a part of a Graduate Research Assistantship completed in October 2020-April 2021 supporting the NASA IRI Global Flash Flood Risk Project (Flash Flood Risk Project). This internship was a continuation of previous 2018 and 2019 internship work, as a part of year three of a four year project.

Datasets Used:

Reference Global Databases for Flash Floods:

• IFRC Go available here
• EMDAT: International Disaster Database available here
• DesInventar: Natural Hazard Database available here
• Dartmouth Flood Observatory: Record of most recent flood events avaialbe here
• Glide: Referenced disaster events numerically available here

Reference Online Media:

• Floodlist: Worldwide flood articles avilable here
• ReliefWeb from UNOCHA available here
• Youtube

Objectives:

This GRA internship was composed of an initial part of reflection on the different flash flood definitions and triggers, and a review of the available sources and related available information that could be used to complete the global historical flash flood compendium.

• Flash flood definition literature review
• Review of existing flash flood datasets
• Design a process to include new flash flood events within the database
• Complete current flash flood database with 200 events

Results:

Updating the Flash flood Identifiers into 3 Categories:

The flash flood identifiers were organized into three categories: “Meteorology”, “Hydrology”, and “Human-land interaction”. The rationale of this approach was to “diagnose” the underlying factors of the flash flood indentiers, with the meteorology section covering a triggering event for the flood event itself, and the hydrology and human-land interaction categories covering existing features in the terrain, either natural or significantly altered by human activity, that influence the flash flood event.

Another category was added to the compendium called “Flood Dynamics”. While the three categories for flash flood identifiers cover the conditions leading to the flash flood event, the flood dynamics category covers the actual conditions of the flood itself. This includes running vs. stagnant water, speed of the running water, duration of the flood, onset time of the flood, infiltration of rain in homes, and the mentioning of the term “flash flood”.

Assessing the Scale of Impacted Areas:

Another category was added to the compendium called “Spatial Scale of Impact.” This category includes a three-tiered approach to categorizing the size of impact on the ground: large scale, which covers an entire country or several districts, medium scale, which covers a select region, and small scale, which covers a single town, river, or structure.