Incorporating the effect of DEM resolution and accuracy for improved flood inundation mapping

Topography plays a major role in determining the accuracy of flood inundation areas. However, many areas in the United States and around the world do not have access to high quality topographic data in the form of Digital Elevation Models (DEM). For such areas, an improved understanding of the effects of DEM properties such as horizontal resolution and vertical accuracy on flood inundation maps may eventually lead to improved flood inundation modeling and mapping. This study attempts to relate the errors arising from DEM properties such as spatial resolution and vertical accuracy to flood inundation maps, and then use this relationship to create improved flood inundation maps from coarser resolution DEMs with low accuracy. The results from the five stream reaches used in this study show that water surface elevations (WSE) along the stream and the flood inundation area have a linear relationship with both DEM resolution and accuracy. This linear relationship is then used to extrapolate the water surface elevations from coarser resolution DEMs to get water surface elevations corresponding to a finer resolution DEM. Application of this approach show that improved results can be obtained from flood modeling by using coarser and less accurate DEMs, including public domain datasets such as the National Elevation Dataset and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) DEMs. The improvement in the WSE and its application to obtain better flood inundation maps is dependent on the study reach characteristics such as land use, valley shape, reach length and width. Application of the approach presented in this study on more reaches may lead to development of guidelines for flood inundation mapping using coarser resolution and less accurate topographic datasets.