Soil-based Floodplain Mapping
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Flood is the most devastating of all natural disasters, leading to both human fatalities and economic losses worth billions of dollars every year. Flood inundation maps play a key role in mitigating flood related losses by indicating areas that are vulnerable to floods. However, the conventional approach to creating flood maps using hydraulic modeling is resource extensive, and cannot be applied easily in rural data sparse regions in the United States (U.S.). An alternative way to produce floodplain maps is proposed in Sangwan and Merwade (2015), which uses easily accessible gSSURGO soil data to produce floodplain maps for larger regions. This community aims at providing national scale floodplain map for the entire U.S. by implementing Sangwan and Merwade (2015) approach. Comparison of soil based floodplain maps with Flood Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) flood insurance rate maps (FIRMs) show 65% to 90% overlap in many counties in the continental U.S. The soil based floodplain map is provided as a shape file, and can be used for preliminary studies where no other flood maps are available. This approach and the dataset needs to undergo a more comprehensive validation for its broader applicability in floodplain related studies.