Towards an integrated Flood Information System: Centralized data access, analysis, and visualization

• A comprehensive one-stop web platform is developed for flood related data and information.
• Community centric approach provides a customized experience to communities.
• The IFIS provides flood warnings, forecasts, inundation maps, and rainfall products.
• The IFIS helps communities make better-informed decisions on the occurrence of floods.
• The IFIS alerts communities in advance to help them reduce the damage of floods.

The Iowa Flood Information System (IFIS) is a web-based platform developed at the Iowa Flood Center (IFC) in order to provide access to flood inundation maps, real-time flood conditions, flood forecasts, flood-related data, information, applications, and interactive visualizations for communities in Iowa. The IFIS provides community-centric watershed and river characteristics, rainfall conditions, and stream-flow data and visualization tools. Interactive interfaces allow access to inundation maps for different stage and return period values as well as to flooding scenarios with contributions from multiple rivers. Real-time and historical data of water levels, gauge heights, hourly and seasonal flood forecasts, and rainfall conditions are made available by integrating data from NEXRAD radars, IFC stream sensors, and USGS and National Weather Service (NWS) stream gauges. The IFIS provides customized flood-related data, information, and visualization for over 1000 communities in Iowa. To help reduce the damage from floods, the IFIS helps communities make better-informed decisions about the occurrence of floods and alerts communities in advance using NWS and IFC forecasts. The integrated and modular design and structure of the IFIS allows easy adaptation of the system in other regional and scientific domains. This paper provides an overview of the design and capabilities of the IFIS that was developed as a platform to provide one-stop access to flood-related information.

Figure optionsDownload as PowerPoint slide