MS Proposal Defense of John Baer

Quantifying Precipitation-Induced Uncertainty in Flood Hazard Assessment for a Coastal Urban Area

Flooding is the costliest disaster in the United States, and its impacts are projected to grow under climate and land use change. To prepare for and mitigate these disasters, governments and other entities use flood hazard maps to make critical decisions regarding insurance requirements, development strategies, and resiliency plans. Yet most current flood hazard maps are constructed using the “design storm” approach, which relies on flawed assumptions about rainfall, and does not typically account for model uncertainty. The proposed research will address these limitations through a novel workflow that combines high-resolution precipitation data with hydrodynamic modeling and ensemble methods, creating flood hazard maps that are more meteorologically and hydrologically realistic, and that clearly communicate uncertainty. The maps produced by this framework will in turn provide more comprehensive hazard information to stakeholders, leading to better planning for and recovery from flooding disasters.