Working with communities in Burlington, Cincinnati, Portland, Charlotte, Boulder, and Minneapolis as well as our partners at NOAA, we conducted a landscape analysis of how community resilience planning operates in practice, how the NWM could be leveraged in this work, and how NOAA and the National Water Center could make the NWM more accessible to this new group of potential users.


 

Project Background

The NWM was originally focused on supporting emergency managers in their response to flood events.  But the NWM  can also support adaptation, mitigation, and resilience, where action occurs far in advance of an emergency. To examine this more expansive role, the project team engaged  six geographically diverse communities (Portland, OR; Boulder, CO; Minneapolis, MN; Charlotte, NC; Cincinnati, OH; and Burlington, VT). Each community participated in a series of interviews to better understand: (1) how resilience-related planning operates in practice, (2) their existing knowledge of the NWM, and (3) their perspectives on how the NWM could be applied in planning for water-related vulnerabilities and hazards. The project team also conducted a complementary set of interviews with NOAA and NWC staff to understand their perspectives. Additionally, each community and NOAA/NWC staff were invited to participate in a collaborative session to co-generate recommendations for how the NWM could be used in community resilience planning and how the NWC could facilitate this use.

The study found that while  65% of the community interviewees had initially never heard of the NWM, once engaged by the project team they were excited to learn about it and had many ideas for how it could be used in their work. These ideas included: (1) leveraging the NWM to support emergency management decisions, such as where to locate (or relocate) key resources ahead of a flooding event, (2) using the NWM’s retrospective data to see how looking to the past could inform the future, and (3) using the NWM to provide flood risk information in areas that have no other source of science-based information. The engagement with resilience stakeholders also revealed three categories of recommendations for how NOAA and the NWC could improve service delivery: (1) how to improve awareness of the NWM, (2) how to increase the accessibility of the model, including suggestions for case studies, training opportunities, and to tailor communications to diverse audiences, and (3) community requests for enhanced capabilities, such as incorporating climate or future projections.

Research Publication

Recommendation Tables

Phase 1 resulted in a set of extensive recommendations for how the NWM could be used in community resilience planning and how the NWC could support this use. The following is a report that details the full recommendations:

               Analysis and Demonstration of the National Water Models Applicability to Resilience Planning​[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”1″ gal_title=”Cuahsi.onepager.FINAL”]

Poster

* Raub, K., Laufer, J., and Flynn, S. 2023. Proposed uses and enhancements of NOAA’s National Water Model (NWM) to advance equity, climate adaptation, and emergency management: Lessons learned from a community-engaged assessment of the NWM’s value for resilience-related planning. AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA, Dec. 14, poster.

Read About Phase 2

Principal Investigators

Kristin B. Raub, k.raub@northeastern.edu


Team members

  • Kristin B. Raub, k.raub@northeastern.edu
  • Joshua Laufer, laufer.j@northeastern.edu
  • Trissha Sivalingam, t.sivalingam@northeastern.edu
  • Shemilore Daniels, s.daniels@northeastern.edu
  • Samiksha Bhatnagar, bhatnagar.sam@northeastern.edu