Flood Safety Awareness for the Lower Rio Grande Valley: Advanced Hydrologic Prediction System



Flood Safety Awareness for the RGV Advanced Hydrologic Prediction System
The Advanced Hydrologic Prediction System (AHPS) provides water prediction and delivery methods to serve your needs and the needs of all our partners in protecting life and property ranging from floods to droughts. AHPS provides you with user friendly text and graphical forecasts that are available online. The goal of these products is to help emergency managers to be better prepared to defend their communities from floods, and helps recreational water users stay out of harms way. AHPS enables you to get reliable answers to such questions as: How high will the river rise? When will the river crest? Where will it flood? How long will the flood last? How good is the forecast? What are the impacts of the flood?
New in 2013: Inundation Mapping After the Rio Grande Flood of 2010, NOAA/National Weather Service West Gulf River Forecast Center, Southern Region Headquarters, and the Brownsville/Rio Grande Valley office collaborated with the International Boundary and Water Commission and local emergency managers to improve the ability to depict potential flood events along unimproved sections of the Rio Grande in the Upper Valley (Starr/southwest Hidalgo County) by providing inundation maps (right) for the river gage at Rio Grande City. The project was completed in 2012, and the website and data are now available. Inundation mapping is part of a long term goal of improving weather readiness by providing easy to understand maps for decision makers to best determine where and when evacuations should occur in advance of life-threatening flooding. Each map extends well beyond the gaging point itself; ultimately, additional gages and the increased use of geographic information systems will allow most river forecasts to include inundation zones, including the height of the water above ground, in all potential flood areas. Click on the map to view and experiment with the Rio Grande City inundation map. For starters, mouse over the flood crest values on the left hand side and watch the inundation area expand and contract. Follow the instructions to determine water depth at any location in the shaded area. The map indicates the scope of inundation from the Falcon Dam releases following Hurricane Alex in 2010 (flood stage of 57 feet above North American Vertical Datum 1988).	Inundation map for Rio Grande City river gage
The National Weather Service added even more enhancements to the AHPS pages in spring 2012. Known as "Phase VII Enhancements", they included: Forecast issuances more clearly shown (bold fonts and text boxes Multiple NWS Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feed improvements Social media and bookmark features available from the hydrograph pages Improvements to metadata fields in shapefiles used in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Google Maps used for river/stream flood status, River Forecast Center areas of responsibility, and more Summary and "quick link" information available Region–specific web pages will allow for flood status displays from one to ten days Graphic examples of the enhancements can be found here. Previous enhancements in prior years included: Multi-sensored precipitation information Flood inundation mapping at select locations; these include South Central and North Texas Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed alert capabilities Downloadable shape and Keyhole Markup (KMZ) files for Geographic Information System (GIS) users The direct link to the AHPS webpage for Deep South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley is http://water.weather.gov/ahps2/index.php?wfo=bro
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