Biden–Harris Administration $80 Million Investing in America Agenda to Enhance Flood Prediction

Funding helps NOAA’s efforts to improve the Nationwide Water Mannequin and broaden Flood Inundation Mapping companies

NOAA’s new experimental flood inundation maps are at the moment accessible to 10% of the inhabitants, proven in inexperienced. These companies will broaden to just about 100% of the inhabitants by 2026. (Picture credit score: NOAA)

Final month, the Division of Commerce and NOAA’s Workplace of Water Prediction awarded the Subsequent Era Water Prediction Functionality contract to Raytheon, an RTX Enterprise. The $80 million, four-year contract will remodel water prediction by enabling fast deployment of superior water fashions to offer coupled, continental scale, operational coastal and inland flood forecasting and inundation mapping companies.

“Floods can have devastating impacts throughout the nation, harming native economies, damaging infrastructure, and placing lives in danger,” mentioned U.S. Secretary Gina Raimondo. “This funding, made doable by President Biden’s Investing in America Agenda — a key pillar of Bidenomics — will give first responders, emergency managers and the general public higher, quick details about the place, when and the way our communities can be affected by flooding.”

The contract is for the event of two capabilities:

• A brand new Water Sources Modeling framework supporting future variations of the Nationwide Water Mannequin with state-of-the-science hydrologic and hydraulic mannequin formulations, and
• Close to real-time, excessive spatial decision flood inundation maps and companies for almost 100% of the U.S. inhabitants leveraging each forecasts from Nationwide Climate Service River Forecast Facilities and operational steerage from the Nationwide Water Mannequin.

The contract additionally requires Raytheon to ship an built-in, high-resolution hydrographic, topographic and bathymetric geospatial dataset underpinning each the Nationwide Water Mannequin and Flood Inundation Mapping service capabilities, and a cloud-hosted Optimization and Analysis Setting to configure the brand new Nationwide Water Mannequin and Flood Inundation Mapping companies.

These new capabilities will create a pathway to operationalize the brand new fashions and strategies developed by the Cooperative Institute for Analysis to Operations in Hydrology, and finally will allow broader neighborhood engagement as envisioned in NOAA’s Climate, Water and Local weather Technique. Along with operating fashions that predict streamflow, floods and inundation, the brand new Water Sources Modeling framework additionally will present an avenue to deploy improved fashions of drought, soil moisture and water high quality into operations.

“NOAA’s Nationwide Climate Service is taking flood forecasting to the following degree,” mentioned Dr. Michael Morgan, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Commentary and Prediction. “This challenge is predicted to boost our capability to determine and talk potential flooding and cross that life-saving info on to emergency managers, determination makers and the general public.”

The company additionally awarded $7.4 million, of which $1.7 million is Bipartisan Infrastructure Regulation funds, to GAMA-1 Applied sciences to develop the Hydrologic Visualization and Data Companies system within the cloud to function the platform for dissemination of high-resolution flood prediction companies to the nation. Please go to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Regulation web site to find out about different present and future funding alternatives.

Article courtesy of NOAA.

Featured picture by Wil540 artwork (CC BY-SA 4.0 license)