ABSTRACT:

These datasets were obtained from ECMWF/GloFAS on November 13, 2017, to include the flood forecast (area grid) for Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in the USA from August 15 - September 15, 2017. These are contained in netCDF files, one per day.

Note that while folders and files may have the words "areagrid_for_Harvey" in the name, all the data here are for the southeast USA, encompassing both Harvey and Irma impact areas.

Dataset variables:
- dis = forecasted discharge (for all forecast step 1+30 as initial value and 30 daily average values, with ensemble members as 1+50 where the first is the so-called control member and the 50 perturbed members)
- ldd = local drainage direction within routing model
- ups = upstream area of each point within routing model
- rl2,rl5,rl20 = forecast exceedance thresholds for 2-, 5- and 20-year return period flows, based on gumbel distribution from ERA-interim land reanalysis driven through the lisflood routing.

Models used (see [2] for further details):
- Hydrology: River discharge is simulated by the Lisflood hydrological model (van der Knijff et al., 2010) for the flow routing in the river network and the groundwater mass balance. The model is set up on global coverage with horizontal grid resolution of 0.1° (about 10 km in mid-latitude regions) and daily time step for input/output data.
- Meteorology: To set up a forecasting and warning system that runs on a daily basis with global coverage, initial conditions and input forcing data must be provided seamlessly to every point within the domain. To this end, two products are used. The first consists of operational ensemble forecasts of near-surface meteorological parameters. The second is a long-term dataset consistent with daily forecasts, used to derive a reference climatology.

Suggestions for usage:
- Selected software: ArcGIS or QGIS
- Select dis for example, then any of the bands (51*31 in total), then set the range manually to 0-1000 or something like that.

Agency:
GloFAS [1]
From its public website: "The Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS), jointly developed by the European Commission and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), is independent of administrative and political boundaries. It couples state-of-the art weather forecasts with a hydrological model and with its continental scale set-up it provides downstream countries with information on upstream river conditions as well as continental and global overviews. GloFAS produces daily flood forecasts in a pre-operational manner since June 2011."

References
[1] GloFAS home page [http://www.globalfloods.eu/]
[2] Data and methods [http://www.globalfloods.eu/user-information/data-and-methods]

ABSTRACT:

Height Above Nearest Drainage (HAND) is an approach for estimating the vertical height of any point on the landscape from the nearest stream surface or bed. This dataset is based on the U.S. Geological Survey's National Elevation Dataset (NED) with 10-meter horizontal resolution, comprising raster data for the 331 HUC-6 units in conterminous U.S. (CONUS), excluding the five units of the great lakes. This was developed at the UIUC CyberGIS supercomputing facility, and is now archived at the UT Austin TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) for download.

To interactively select HAND data by HUC6 basin in either the Harvey or Irma hydrologic study area, use the Harvey Archive Story Map [http://arcg.is/001jje] or the Irma Archive Story Map [http://arcg.is/PSOKH] and click on the HAND tab. To directly browse this data for anywhere in CONUS, visit [https://web.corral.tacc.utexas.edu/nfiedata/].

For an explanation of the contents of the nfiedata folder at TACC, see README file for this resource.

ABSTRACT:

This is the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) [1]. This is often used by the emergency response community to anticipate areas where social support systems are weaker, and residents may be more likely to need help. A map viewer for the national database can be found here [2].

November 2023 updates: at the time of Hurricane Harvey, the latest SVI was based on 2014 census data. The CDC SVI website and feature services have since changed. See the current (updated) links for more details.

Subsets of CDC's 2014 SVI for the Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma hydrologic study areas can be downloaded from the contents list below.

[1] SVI web site [https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/placeandhealth/svi/index.html
[2] SVI interactive map [https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/placeandhealth/svi/interactive_map.html]]

ABSTRACT:

Quick Start
This is a collection of flood datasets to support hydrologic research for Hurricane Irma in Florida-Georgia, August-September 2017. The best way to start exploring this collection is by opening the Hurricane Irma 2017 Story Map [http://arcg.is/PSOKH]. It has separate tabs for the different content categories, and links to the relevant HydroShare resources within this collection.
For more information on this hurricane archive project, as well as links to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria data archives, see the CUAHSI public page on the Hurricane 2017 Archives. [1]

More Details
This is the root collection resource for management of hydrologic and related data collected during Hurricane Irma, primarily in Florida, Georgia, and neighboring states within the storm's wind swath. This collection holds numerous composite resources comprising streamflow forecasts, inundation polygons and depth grids, flooding impacts, elevation grids, high water marks, and numerous other related information sources. Building outlines (polygons) for the affected states are also provided, to help understand storm impacts.

The data providers for this collection are the NOAA National Weather Service, NOAA National Hurricane Center, NOAA National Water Center, FEMA, 9-1-1 emergency communications agencies, and many others.

User-contributed resources from 2017 US Hurricanes may also be shared with The CUAHSI 2017 Hurricane Data Community group [2] to make them accessible to interested researchers, Anyone may join this group.

This collection has been produced by work on a US National Science Foundation RAPID Award "Archiving and Enabling Community Access to Data from Recent US Hurricanes" [4].

References
[1] CUAHSI Projects > Hurricane 2017 Archives [https://www.cuahsi.org/projects/hurricanes-2017-data-archive ]
[2] CUAHSI 2017 Hurricane Data Community group [https://www.hydroshare.org/group/41]
[3] Hurricane Irma 2017 Archive Story Map [http://arcg.is/PSOKH]
[4] NSF RAPID Grant [https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1761673]

ABSTRACT:

This collection is for datasets of flood depths, flood extents, high water marks, streamflow, damages recorded, aerial oblique photos, and related subjects. This includes both forecast and observed data. These were primarily obtained from national agencies such as NOAA (weather related), USGS (surface water related), FEMA (surface water and damage related), the Civil Air Patrol (aerial photos), and ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, for flood area grids).

ABSTRACT:

The NOAA National Hurricane Center (NHC) publishes advisory bulletins with named storm conditions and expectations, see [1]. We have also downloaded shapefiles for eighty-four 5-day forecasts (published from August 30 to September 11) of track line, predicted points, ensemble forecasts envelope, and affected shoreline where applicable [2]. NOAA also publishes the best track for major storms [3]. The "best track" is a smoothed version of the advisories track. Web services are also provided by NHC for the advisory points and lines [4] [5]. Another user has constructed the Irma track (shapefile) from the NHC advisory bulletins [6].

FEMA also posts windfield data, including peak wind gust and contours [7].
See FEMA disaster webpage [8] for map and list of counties receiving disaster declarations (map pdf available for download from this page)

References
[1] NOAA NHC - Irma storm advisories [http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2017/IRMA.shtml]
[2] NOAA NHC - Irma 5-day forecasts [https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gis/archive_forecast_results.php?id=al11&year=2017&name=Hurricane%20IRMA]
[3] NOAA NHC - best tracks for 2017 storms [https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/index.php?season=2017&basin=atl]
[4] NOAA NHC - Irma advisory points web service [https://services.arcgis.com/XSeYKQzfXnEgju9o/ArcGIS/rest/services/The_2017_Atlantic_Hurricane_season_(to_October_16th)/FeatureServer/1]
[5] NOAA NHC - Irma advisory lines web service [https://services.arcgis.com/XSeYKQzfXnEgju9o/ArcGIS/rest/services/The_2017_Atlantic_Hurricane_season_(to_October_16th)/FeatureServer/6]
[6] Irma Advisories Track, compiled by David Tarboton [https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/546fa3feeaf242fc8aabf9fe05ab454c/]
[7] FEMA public download site for Hurricane Irma 2017 [https://data.femadata.com/NationalDisasters/HurricaneIrma/]
[8] FEMA Disaster Declarations and related links [https://www.fema.gov/disaster/4337]

ABSTRACT:

During and after Hurricane Irma, the US Geological Survey recorded high water marks across the affected area, as they do for every major storm [https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/hurricane-irma]. The files in this dataset provide 506 high water marks for Hurricane Irma flooding, and 202 peak sites. These files were downloaded following the steps below. If you'd like to check the original sources again, or search for HWM for a different storm, you may find these directions helpful.

The High Water Marks can also be visualized directly from the USGS Flood Event Viewer for Irma [https://stn.wim.usgs.gov/fev/#IrmaSeptember2017]

Finding, Downloading and Filtering USGS High Water Marks (HWM)
1. Visit USGS website: https://water.usgs.gov/floods/history.html, which lets you…
2. Click on Hurricane Irma: https://www.usgs.gov/irma, which lets you…
3. Click on green button Get Data: https://stn.wim.usgs.gov/fev/#IrmaSeptember2017
4. In left margin menu of resulting page, click a second Get Data link. This will open up the remaining options below.
5. Click each data type you want, such as High-Water Mark, Peak Summary, or Sensor Data. It’s only csv or REST (json or xml).

* To understand the fields or columns of this table, see HWM_Peaks_Sensors_Data_Dictionary_20180329.xslx in the contents below.

ABSTRACT:

The National Water Model (NWM) is a water forecasting model operated by the NOAA National Weather Service that continually forecasts flows on 2.7 million stream reaches covering 3.2 million miles of streams and rivers in the continental United States [1]. It operates as part of the national weather forecasting system, with inputs from NOAA numerical weather prediction models, and from weather and water conditions observed through the US Geological Survey's National Water Information System. Reference materials for the computational framework behind NWM is published by NCAR [9] [10].

The NWC generates NWM streamflow forecasts for the continental US (CONUS) with multiple forecast horizons and time steps. Due to the output file sizes, these are normally not available for download more than a couple days at a time [2]. A 40-day rolling window of these forecasts is maintained by HydroShare at RENCI [3], and a complete retrospective (August 2016 to the present) of the NWM Analysis & Assimilation outputs is maintained as well (contact help@cuahsi.org for access).

An archive of all NWM forecasts for the period Aug 29 to Sept 17, 2017 has been compiled at RENCI [4] [5], available as netCDF (.nc) files totaling 6.8 TB. These can be browsed, subsetted, visualized, and downloaded (see [6] [7] [8]). In addition to these output files, we have uploaded to this HydroShare resource the input parameter files needed to re-run the NWM for the Irma period, or for any time period covered by NWM v1.1 and 1.2 (August 2016 to this publication date in August 2018). These parameter files are also made available at [1].

See README for further details and usage guidance. Please see NOAA contacts listed on [1] for questions about the NWM data contents, structure and formats. Contact help@cuahsi.org if any questions about HydroShare-based tools and data access.

References
[1] Overview of the NWM framework and output files [http://water.noaa.gov/about/nwm]
[2] Free access to all National Water Model output for the most recent two days [ftp://ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/nwm]
[3] NWM outputs for rolling 40-day window, maintained by HydroShare [http://thredds.hydroshare.org/thredds/catalog/nwm/catalog.html]
[4] Archived Irma NWM outputs via RENCI THREDDS server [http://thredds.hydroshare.org/thredds/catalog/nwm/irma/catalog.html]
[5] RENCI is an Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
[6] Live map for National Water Model forecasts [http://water.noaa.gov/map]
[7] NWM Forecast Viewer app [https://hs-apps.hydroshare.org/apps/nwm-forecasts]
[8] CUAHSI JupyterHub example scripts for subsetting NWM output files [https://hydroshare.org/resource/3db192783bcb4599bab36d43fc3413db/]
[9] WRF-Hydro Overview [https://ral.ucar.edu/projects/wrf_hydro/overview]
[10] WRF-Hydro User Guide 2013 [https://ral.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/public/images/project/WRF_Hydro_User_Guide_v3.0.pdf]

ABSTRACT:

This resource contains statewide networks of roadways, bridges, and railway crossings, for Florida only. These datasets were obtained from Florida Dept of Transportation (FDOT) in August 2018 via their website [1]. The FDOT GIS data is continually being updated, so if you wish to find the most complete and current data, please visit that site.

Contained in the zipfile:
- Roadways (28,992 instances) including the following:
- Interstate Highways (81)
- US Highways (643)
- Toll Roads (90)
- State Highways(1,917)
- Active on the State Highway System (1,450)
- Active off the State Highway System (9,452)
- Florida Roadways (15,359)
- Bridges (9,527)
- Railway Crossings (1,937)
- Numerous other GIS feature layers as well.
All feature layers in the FDOT geodatabase also have ArcMap (.lyr) files for efficient loading and symbolizing.

References:
[1] FDOT GIS data [http://www.fdot.gov/statistics/gis/]

ABSTRACT:

This resource groups data downloaded from FEMA public FTP site for Hurricane Irma [1] for depth grids, flood extents, windfield, and damage assessments.
See FEMA's Natural Hazard Risk Assessment Program (NHRAP) ftp site [2] for additional HWM-based depth grids, inundation polygons, and windfield.

References and related links:
[1] FEMA public download site for Hurricane Irma 2017 [https://data.femadata.com/NationalDisasters/HurricaneIrma/]
[2] FEMA NHRAP ftp [https://data.femadata.com/FIMA/NHRAP/Irma/]

ABSTRACT:

The Civil Air Patrol is routinely tasked by FEMA and local public safety officials with taking aerial photographs. This collection comprises about 38,000 photos taken over Florida and Georgia during September 8-20, 2017. These were originally uploaded to the web using the GeoPlatform.gov imageUploader capability, and hosted as a web map layer [1]. For this Irma collection, I exported the dataset of photo location points to a local computer, subset it to the Irma event, and created a shapefile, which is downloadable below. The photos and thumbnails were not included in this archive, but are attribute-linked to the FEMA-Civil Air Patrol image library on Amazon cloud [2].

Note: The cameras used by the Civil Air Patrol generally do not have an electronic compass with their GPS to record the viewing direction. The easiest way to determine the general angle is to look at consecutive frame counterpoints to establish the flightpath direction at nadir and adjust for the photographer's position behind the pilot looking out the window hatch on the port (left) side of the aircraft. The altitude above ground level is typically between 1000-1500 feet, so it's easy to locate features in reference orthoimages.

References
[1] US federal GeoPlatform.gov Image Uploader map service (ArcGIS Server) [https://imageryuploader.geoplatform.gov/arcgis/rest/services/ImageEvents/MapServer]
[2] FEMA-Civil Air Patrol image library on Amazon cloud [https://fema-cap-imagery.s3.amazonaws.com]

ABSTRACT:

At the request of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a team at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed a method for capturing building outlines over a large area. For Hurricane Irma, ORNL assembled this collection [1] of building footprints for Florida (6.5 million), Georgia (3.5 million), Alabama (2.4 million), and the South Carolina coastal area (374k). This was intended as an overlay with predicted or observed flooding extent, to estimate the number of buildings that might be damaged. While not completely accurate, these building outlines are useful for estimating aggregate totals across large areas of interest.

References
[1] FEMA public FTP download site [https://data.femadata.com/NationalDisasters/HurricaneIrma/Data/Buildings/Outlines/OakRidgeNationalLaboratory/]

ABSTRACT:

This resource contains medium-resolution (1:100k) National Hydrography Dataset (NHDPlus) [1] map data for a region of 23 Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC) 6-digit (HUC6) basins around the Hurricane Irma impact zone across Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. This includes 5,236 subwatersheds, 217,308 catchments, and 220,418 flowlines.

State and county boundaries were obtained from the Esri Living Atlas [2].

USGS active stream gages can be downloaded from the USGS National Water Information System (NWIS) [3], or visualized at the USGS WaterWatch site [4].
NOAA Advanced Hydrologic Prediction System (AHPS) river forecast points can be downloaded as well [5]. Many of these are co-located with USGS NWIS gages to leverage authoritative observation data.

References
[1] NHDPlus Version 2 [http://www.horizon-systems.com/NHDPlus/V2NationalData.php]
[2] Esri Living Atlas [https://livingatlas.arcgis.com]
[3] USGS NWIS [https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis]
[4] USGS WaterWatch [https://waterwatch.usgs.gov]
[5] NOAA AHPS [https://water.weather.gov/ahps/forecasts.php]

ABSTRACT:

This resource links to the Hurricane Irma 2017 Story Map (Esri ArcGIS Online web app) [1] that provides a graphical overview and set of interactive maps to download flood depth grids, flood extent polygons, high water marks, stream gage observations, National Water Model streamflow forecasts, and several other datasets compiled before, during and after Hurricane Irma.

References
[1] Hurricane Irma Story Map [https://arcg.is/19z9jL]

Referenced external maps
Irma crowdsource photos story map (NAPSG) [https://arcg.is/1WOr4b]

ABSTRACT:

Height Above Nearest Drainage (HAND) is an approach for estimating the vertical height of any point on the landscape from the nearest stream surface or bed. The first version 0.1 of this dataset is based on the U.S. Geological Survey's National Elevation Dataset (NED) with 10-meter horizontal resolution, comprising raster data for the 331 HUC-6 units in conterminous U.S. (CONUS), excluding the five units of the great lakes. This was developed at the UIUC CyberGIS supercomputing facility, and is now archived at the UT Austin TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) for download [1]. As of summer 2020, it has been updated to version 0.2, now hosted at Oak Ridge National Lab's HPC server [2]. The 2017 Harvey subset of CONUS HAND is at [3].

In 2023, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) computed the 3-meter HAND for Texas, see [4].

To interactively select HAND data by HUC6 basin in either the Harvey or Irma hydrologic study area, use the Harvey Archive Story Map [https://arcg.is/1rWLzL0] or the Irma Archive Story Map [http://arcg.is/PSOKH] and click on the HAND tab. To directly browse this data for anywhere in CONUS, visit [1] or [2].

References:
For a bibliography of technical papers leading to the development of HAND, see the PrimaryRefs_NWM-HAND_Jan2018.pdf file in the contents list below.
For an explanation of the contents of the nfiedata folder at TACC, see the README-Nfiedata_HAND.pdf file in the contents list below.

[1] University of Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) repository for version 0.1 of 10m CONUS HAND [https://web.corral.tacc.utexas.edu/nfiedata/]
[2] Most recent HAND products at ORNL [https://cfim.ornl.gov/data/]
[3] Harvey subset of national HAND [https://cfim.ornl.gov/data/nfiedata/Harvey/]
[4] 3m HAND for state of Texas computed by ORNL [https://web.corral.tacc.utexas.edu/nfiedata/pin2flood/texas/]