Getting accurate flood extents in a timely manner is of great importance. In this study, the performance of a real-time-flood-inundation-mapping framework based on a simplified model—Height Above the Nearest Drainage (HAND) was evaluated in a case study for Iowa. The impacts of three key model parameters (drainage threshold, water depth, and the resolution of data) on the prediction accuracy of the HAND model were studied. Furthermore, we explored the effectiveness of variable water depths, community-level analysis, and inner zone creation, with which the performance of inundation predictions could be improved without involving additional data. The performance of the HAND model was evaluated by comparing simulated flood extents against statewide flood hazard maps for 100- and 500-year flooding events. This study demonstrates the capacity of the HAND model to predict flood extents. It also presents novel approaches in improving the performance of inundation mapping in a simple and practicable way.
Related Articles
- Li, Z., Mount, J. and Demir, I., 2020. Evaluation of Model Parameters of HAND Model for Real-Time Flood Inundation Mapping: Iowa Case Study. Journal of Hydrology. EarthArXiv. July, 1.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31223/osf.io/hqpzg (in review) (pre-print)
