The University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Dr.
Our Partners' Project with NWC is funded through COMET-UCAR
Thu, 04/19/2018 - 12:58pmOur proposal to the COMET-UCAR program has been approved to start a Partners' project with the National Water Center (NWC). The project focuses on examining the regional and local utility of the National Water Model (NWM) for flood applications that typically take place at local counties and municipalities for the purposes of floodplain mapping, flood mitigation, and project feasibility and design. The project will provide analysis-based insight on how the NWM outputs can support “local” engineering-type models and extend the power of the NWM for flood analysis at community-level scales. The project will be implemented as a pilot-scale application in a local basin in southwest Louisiana (Coulee Mines), a region with typical low-gradient topography and frequent severe rainfall and extreme flood events.
As part of the project, we plan to collaborate with the NWC staff on setting up, implementation and interpretation of NWM local and regional simulations, and their coupling with other engineering-type models developed for the local region. We also plan to collaborate the operational hydrologists at Lower Mississippi River Forecasting Center (LMRFC) to assess the performance of NWM simulations over watersheds in Lafayette and south Louisiana.
(Schematic representations of possible NWM-HEC linkages.)
(Location of the study site, the Coulee Mine watershed, in southwest Louisiana.)