An Analysis and Demonstration of the National Water Model’s Applicability to Community Resilience Planning

Project Background

Funded by NOAA, the Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH), is a Cooperative Institute led by the University of Alabama focused on advancing water prediction abilities and building resilience to water-based disasters. In partnership with CUAHSI, this study investigates how NOAA’s National Water Model (NWM) can be leveraged by a new group of potential end users. The National Water Model is a nationwide hydrologic model (primarily river and streamflow), overseen by NOAA’s National Water Center, that provides data and information on where water has been in the past (40-year retrospective capability), where it is presently, and where it will be in the future (18 hours, 10 day, and up to a 30-day forecasting ability). The first version of the NWM was released in 2016. The current version is 3.0, with a series of planned updates and new services set to be launched in the next 24 months, including the Next Generation Framework and Flood Inundation Mapping.

The three Phases of this study are designed to 1) better understand the landscape of how “community resilience planning” operates in practice and how communities can leverage the NWM to support their resilience planning, 2) co-develop a set of use cases that demonstrate the use of the NWM and increase its accessibility, and 3) further investigate the accessibility of the NWM for communities and co-develop solutions for its use in resilience planning.

Funding Statement

This research was supported by the Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) with funding under award NA22NWS4320003 from the NOAA Cooperative Institute Program. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of NOAA.

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