Identifying Flood Risks to Transportation Infrastructure in Texas

Challenge

The Texas Department of Transportation maintains 38,000 miles of roads in the Austin area, many of which deal with major flooding issues. Accurate road elevation maps are critical to proactive flood response.

Solution

Texas has extensive lidar data covering Austin’s 38,000 miles of roads. Managers used high-performance computing to filter this data, selecting the most accurate and recent information. They then integrated it with flood modeling layers and NOAA’s high-resolution land cover data to analyze roads and bridges under various flood scenarios, identifying several bridges as potentially at risk from flooding. The elevation models and inundation maps resulting from these efforts allow the department of transportation to be proactive in its emergency management planning for flood response and provide better information for citizens and communities.

This map shows road and bridge features mapped from NOAA's high-resolution land cover and elevation data to identify flood risks within the transportation network.

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