Developing rapid flood prediction capabilities

A team of NMSU researchers has been funded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to develop tools for rapid monitoring and prediction of water levels in the Rio Grande Basin.

The agency, a part of the Department of Defense, is providing $450,000 over three years for the project through its University Research Initiative program. The researchers will enhance existing software tools and develop new techniques for using remote-sensing data to monitor water levels and predict events such as flash floods with precision not currently possible.

The project will create a hydrologic model of the Rio Grande Basin from El Paso north to the river’s headwaters in southern Colorado, said Bill Stein, senior imagery analyst with NMSU’s Physical Science Laboratory and one of the lead scientists on the project.

Using 25 years’ worth of meteorological and hydrological data, plus continuous updates from satellite imagery and other remote-sensing techniques, the researchers aim to develop tools to monitor and predict flows in real time.

“I’m not aware of any operational capability in the country right now to do flash flood forecasting with the level of detail that we’re going to attempt,” said Max Bleiweiss, a scientist in the NMSU College of Agriculture and Home Economics and co-principal investigator on the project. “With the data we’ll have available to us, we should be able to come up with some fairly pointed forecasts.”