Planning: CHIRRP: Utility of Hyperlocal Flood Data to Co-Advance Urban Flood Knowledge and Mitigation Solutions with Multiple Stakeholders

Of the many Earth system hazards that are expected to increase with climate change, urban flooding is one of the most dangerous and costly by negatively impacting public health, safety, infrastructure, and mobility. Multiple stakeholders, including the National Weather Service, city agencies, emergency management teams, community members, and Earth Science researchers, require real-time, quantitative, and accurate data on ongoing and past flood events. To address this need, low-cost water level sensors are being developed by the FloodNet project in New York City to collect, transmit, and provide data on flood depth to stakeholders. The ultimate goal is to make flood data and monitoring tools accessible and useful to stakeholders to ultimately advance flood risk knowledge and mitigation and build community flood resilience. However, there remain open questions related to flood data use by different stakeholders and strategies needed to clean, analyze, and distribute the data to meet desired use cases. The main goal of this planning grant is to develop collaborative partnerships with government agencies, the National Weather Service, and Earth Science researchers, and use the extensive dataset being produced by FloodNet to co-identify and refine research questions aimed at using flood sensor data to better understand and predict urban flooding, as well as implement community-level actions toward adaptation and mitigation. This project will be conducted through the following objectives: (1) develop and optimize data processing tools to prepare the flood dataset for actionable use; (2) assess desired use cases for flood data at real-time, intermediate, and long-term time scales, and needs for integrating data into existing information systems; and (3) share flood data with stakeholders to co-identify research questions related to flood risk mitigation and needs for design of new tools for data integration and sensemaking, to ultimately co-develop actionable tools and services to aid flood adaptation and mitigation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.