They created separate models for each watershed in the United States. The computer was able to “learn” from actual reports of damage to predict areas of high flood damage likelihood for each pixel of mapped land. To create their computer models, researchers used reported data of flood damage for the United States, along with other information such as whether land is close to a river or stream, type of land cover, soil type, and precipitation. “This is the first spatially complete map of flood damage probability for the United States wall-to-wall information that can be used to learn more about flood risk in vulnerable, underrepresented communities,” says Ross Meentemeyer, professor of geospatial analytics. Researchers say their method of using machine learning tools to estimate flood risk offers a way of rapidly updating flood maps as conditions change or more information becomes available. It can cost FEMA as much as $11.8 billion to create national Flood Insurance Rate Maps, which show whether an area has at least a 1% chance of flooding in a year, according to a 2020 report from the Association of State Floodplain Managers. “There are a lot of places that are susceptible to flooding, and because they’re outside the floodplain, that means they do not have to abide by insurance, building code, and land-use requirements that could help protect people and property.” “We’re seeing that there’s a lot of flood damage being reported outside of the 100-year floodplain,” says Elyssa Collins, a doctoral candidate in the North Carolina State University Center for Geospatial Analytics and lead author of the Environmental Research Letters paper. ![]() That was more than 790,000 square miles greater than flood risk zones identified by FEMA’s maps. ![]() In the study, researchers found a high probability of flood damage-including monetary damage, human injury, and loss of life-for more than a million square miles of land across the United States across a 14-year period. The findings suggest that recent flood maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency do not capture the full extent of flood risk.
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