ESTABLISHING A SCREENING TOOL TO SUPPORT DEVELOPMENT AND PRIORITIZATION OF WATERSHED BASED FLOOD PROTECTION PLANS

Flood risk analysis is the instrument for utility managers to create a sound strategy and adaptation plans into their communities. Local municipalities are being continuously challenged every year by the impacts of climate change. The need to develop a screening tool to analyze watersheds and find risk areas is the goal of this research. Open source high-quality data is allowing climate scientists to create innovative ways to study watersheds when performing spatial analysis for inundation areas. The development procedures for a screening tool involved combining readily available data on topography, groundwater, surface water, tidal information for coastal communities, soils, open space, and rainfall data. All efforts to help develop a planning level framework that allows investigators to target the optimal set of outcomes for a given community. This framework appears to be viable across cities that may be inundated with water due to sea-level rise, rainfall, runoff upstream, and other natural events.