The FIM provides near-real-time, high-resolution, street-level visualizations of flood waters to assist NWS forecasters in issuing flood watches and warnings. FIM services are now available to twice as many NWS weather forecast offices with new coverage for:

• Hawaii and the West Coast;
• Portions of South Central Alaska, including the Cook Inlet, Kenai Peninsula, Copper River, and Prince William Sound watersheds;
• The Southwest and Great Plains; and
• The Great Lakes, and interior Southeast.

“Flooding is the most frequent severe weather-related threat, and our costliest natural disaster,” said David Vallee, director, Service Innovation and Partnership Division, NOAA’s National Water Center. “Expanding our FIM availability has been a game-changer in providing actionable, real-time information to emergency and water resource managers, and will expand the delivery of impact-based decision support services to our core partners who work to keep Americans safe and informed.”

FIM helps provide approximate spatial estimates of land area that is covered in water, based on modeled forecast river flows and current conditions, with detailed information on where flooding impacts may occur.

About NOAA’s Flood Inundation Mapping 

FIM services launched in 2023 for 10% of the country, serving portions of Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas. In 2024, FIM expanded to cover 30% of the U.S. population, covering areas stretching from the Mid-Atlantic and eastern Great Lakes to the Lower Mississippi Valley and central Gulf Coast region, Washington and parts of Oregon in the Pacific Northwest region, and Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The expanded FIM maps are available on the National Water Prediction Service website and in several geographic information system applications. 

There are four unique maps available in near-real-time for the Lower 48 and parts of south-central Alaska:

• National Water Model derived hourly inundation analysis of current conditions
• National Water Model streamflow prediction based five-day inundation forecast
• NWS River Forecast Center (RFC) streamflow prediction based five-day inundation forecast
• Static “categorical” FIM (CatFIM) maps for select NWS River Forecast Points within the FIM domain

FIM services will be slightly different for Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to capture the fast-response floods on these rivers and streams. As the precipitation forecasting models are different for these areas when compared with the continental U.S., a 48-hour forecast based on National Water Model streamflow predictions will be used to create FIM instead of the five-day flood inundation forecasts from the National Water Model and RFCs.

Looking ahead 

In 2026, FIM will be fully deployed in communities nationwide and available for 110,000 river miles near and downstream of NWS RFC forecast point locations. It will also be available for more than 3.6 million river miles covered by National Water Model forecasts. 

The post NOAA’s Flood Inundation Mapping Tool Expands to 60% of U.S. first appeared on Association of State Floodplain Managers.

The Climate Risk and Resilience Portal (ClimRR), a joint initiative by the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, FEMA and AT&T, provides climate data sets in a nontechnical format to help communities make informed decisions about a range of future weather-related conditions. Initial hazards included in ClimRR are temperature, precipitation, wind, and drought. Additional risks, such as inland and coastal flooding as well as wildfire, will be added in the coming months.

Climate projections from ClimRR can be overlayed with community and infrastructure information sourced from FEMA’s Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool (RAPT). Combining data from ClimRR and RAPT allows users to understand local-scale climate risks in the context of existing community demographics and infrastructure, including the location of vulnerable populations and critical infrastructure.

FEMA’s collaboration on ClimRR and the Biden-Harris Administration’s recently released Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation (CMRA) assessment tool represent the federal commitment to making climate science data available so communities across America can make risk-informed investments to become more resilient, according to the launch announcement.  

AT&T originally commissioned Argonne’s Center for Climate Resilience and Decision Science to produce the climate projections in ClimRR for the company’s own adaptation efforts. Through this collaboration, AT&T has made the data used in ClimRR publicly available.

The goals of ClimRR are to:

• Provide free and equitable access to peer-reviewed climate datasets to support analysis and data-driven planning for future climate risks.
• Empower non-technical individuals, organizations, planners and decision-makers at state, local, tribal, and territorial governments to gain awareness of future climate conditions and to conduct climate risk-informed analyses to support decision-making and adaptation efforts.
• Enable technical audiences to access to data and apply results to examine infrastructure design criteria, development plans, and other technical analyses that would benefit from the use of robust data for future climate conditions.
• Contextualize how climate risks factor into equity considerations and barriers to community and infrastructure disaster resilience.
• Provide near-nationwide assessments of the variables affecting future climate conditions and their potential impacts.

To demonstrate effective strategies for ClimRR data, “Use Cases” are available to help decision makers think about how to analyze and operationalize the data. The ClimRR Report Generator provides climate, community, and infrastructure data for local areas in an easy-to-read report. The ClimRR Data Explorer allows users to conduct on-the-fly analyses using various climate, community, and infrastructure datasets.

Visit the ClimRR portal.

The post Climate Risk and Resilience Portal Aims to Help Boost Preparedness first appeared on Association of State Floodplain Managers.

The Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation (CMRA) portal, an easily accessible and interactive geospatial website, is designed to equip those on the ground with the tools they need to plan and prepare, and to access federal resources to build greater resilience, according to Deputy National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi. There is also a section of tools for community members to help them understand the climate risks in their area and actions they can take to mitigate those risks.

Announced by the White House this week, in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of the Interior (DOI), the CMRA portal, features:

• Real-time monitoring dashboard: To help track the climate-related hazards that are affecting communities each day, a new dashboard brings together maps showing areas currently under extreme heat advisories, drought conditions, and inland and coastal flooding warnings, as well as the locations of active wildfires and areas of poor air quality they produce.  
• Assessments of local climate exposure: In addition to real-time data about extreme weather events, the portal also helps communities understand their historic and future exposure to various climate impacts. The portal’s Assessment Tool provides hazard reports on heat, drought, and flooding down to the census tract level, including projections of future impacts in both low and high-emissions scenarios, based on climate models used in the U.S. National Climate Assessment. This interactive application will help local resilience planners and other users understand how future temperature, precipitation, and flooding conditions may impact their community in the near-term and by mid- and late-century.
• Funding opportunities and other federal resources: The portal also centralizes federal data, programs, and funding opportunities that are available to support resilience efforts—including resources for various climate hazards. The CMRA Assessment Tool will also help state, local, Tribal, and territorial governments develop data-driven proposals to access federal funding.

The portal’s Assessment Tool also integrates data and information with such recent federal  initiatives as the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, which identifies disadvantaged communities; the Building Code Adoption Tracking Portal; and the 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report. 

In addition, users can explore maps, data, federal programs, funding opportunities, and other resources to support climate resilience planning across five key climate hazards: extreme heat, drought, wildfire, flooding, and coastal inundation.

For example, the section on flooding features

• A series of interactive maps on precipitation predictions over the next 72 hours and in 2050, as well as identified flood hazard areas
• Links to a variety of federal funding opportunities from FEMA, USDA, and EPA
• Select resources, including the USGS National Water Dashboard and Flood Event Viewer, NOAA’s River Forecast Center, and more. 

The collaborative interagency group developing CMRA includes the White House Domestic Climate Policy Office, Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Council on Environmental Quality; Office of Management and Budget; and members of the White House Climate-Smart Infrastructure Interagency Working Group. 

CMRA was developed by Esri, a geographic information system software company, through a contract with NOAA. Development of CMRA was co-funded by NOAA and the Department of Interior. 

Explore the CMRA web portal at resilience.climate.gov.

The post New Portal to Help Communities Assess Exposure to Climate Hazards first appeared on Association of State Floodplain Managers.