Flooding poses a significant threat to society, ecosystem, and infrastructure, including Department of Defense (DoD) installations. A changing climate may increase the magnitude and frequency of flood events and further exacerbate the consequent damages. DoD recognizes these potential impacts and considers climate change as a critical threat to national security as it can directly impact DoD missions/infrastructure safety. To adapt and prevent interruptions to critical DoD operations, it is important to develop a comprehensive assessment framework that can enable the understanding of the climate change-induced vulnerability of DoD infrastructures. To this end, the objective of the project is to utilize a high-resolution hierarchical modeling framework for assessing climate change-induced flood vulnerability for selected DoD installations and surrounding communities.

This project will demonstrate climate change-informed flood vulnerability assessment, by developing and implementing a high-resolution, physics-based hierarchical modeling framework. The framework comprises climate, hydrologic, and two-dimensional hydrodynamic models to generate high-resolution ensemble inundation maps under historic and projected future climate conditions. The framework will help inform climate change-driven flood vulnerability through multiple state-of-the-art climate models as a part of the latest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 effort. The ensemble inundation data will be used for climate-informed frequency analysis as a consistent approach for evaluating flood inundation. The resulting high-resolution inundation maps will help identify the vulnerability of existing infrastructure under historic and future climate conditions.

The expected project outcomes include: (a) high-resolution inundation maps accounting for climate change, and (b) a novel high-fidelity, high-resolution integrated modeling tool based on open-source data and software generating these maps for sites of DoD interest. This methodology will have the capability to be expanded to other DoD sites within and outside the U.S. The resulting data may be linked with existing tools and methods that are being developed by DoD, such as DoD Climate Hazard Tool for direct integration, visualization, and dissemination to benefit the end-users/decision-makers. DoD managers will be provided with the most up-to-date future inundation projections to support informed decision-making regarding flood mitigation measures and planning to safeguard DoD installations from future flood hazards.