Flooding is a life-threatening and expensive issue in coastal communities of South Florida and across the nation. More and more areas will be subject to coastal flooding in the future due to the rising sea levels. This project uses a community driven approach to address some of the challenges associated with coastal flooding. In addition to tidal floods, we are also interested in all kinds of naturally occurred flooding including inland floods (hence the #FloodMiami social media presence). Your help will enable FIU scientists to do the following
An important goal of this project is to have an accurate measure of where flooding occurs naturally. Finding all flooded locations across Greater Miami is impossible for a small crew. Our hope is that your help and the "power of the crowds" will help us build the most complete and up-to-date database of floods in South Florida. We ask you to make observations of floods whenever you encounter them.
Inundation can be simulated using numerical models which are already being used to forecast flooding. This is a complicated task. The accuracy of the output is also of question. How do we know if our models perform well? Your observations of floods will help us validate these models so that we have a better understanding of how they relate to real world scenarios.
Street level inundation mapping and forecasting requires precise input data that is not usually available. Your observations that confirm areas missed by inundation models will be used to modify the underlying hydrodynamics in these models. These improvements based on real world observations will help us to create the most accurate inundation forecasts in the Greater Miami area.
You have different options to get involved and help with our research. Mapping flood locations is really simple but goes a long way. The workflow is like this: you take photos, record locations and make sure these observations reach us. Using your smartphone with the built-in GPS is a convenient way to do this.
Use your smartphone to take photos of naturally occured floods
Use the built in GPS to geotag your photos
Make sure your photos reach us
As for sending your contributions, you have the following options:
The need for verifiable flood observations turned our interest to utilizing social media and citizen science. To fill in some of these data gaps, the idea is conceived
Flood related Flickr photos were collected from the Miami metropolitan area in an exploratory manner. The experiment yielded more flood-related observations than what is available in Miami-Dade County's 311 register.
The GIS Center collaborates with Yuepeng Li from FIU's Extreme Events Institute on a different project, which reveals common interest in utilizing these new sources of data for inundation modeling.
The born of this website, launch of Twitter profile and the citizen science project/application. The beginning of promotion and outreach in the hope of gaining enough number of interested citizen scientists for a successful project.
The first active citizen-science event focusing in a small area is held on October 26, 2019. Citizen scientist gather right before the peak of king tide and survey Matheson Hammock Park. The data is used to test the proposed methodology. Register on Meetup.
Project lead, geodata nerd. Conducts data-driven research that utilizes citizen science, user generated content, geoprocessing, geovisualization, the geospatial web and its applications to address real-world issues.
Expert numerical modeler working on coastal research, including storm surges, hurricanes and sea level rise as well as inland flooding assessment.
Interested in smart cities, virtual/augmented reality. Licensed drone pilot with an expertise in unmanned aerial vehicles and their remote sensing applications.
Years of project management experience working closely together with local, state and federal agencies as well as municipalities on a number of applied geospatial research projects.
Affiliated project member from the University of Florida where he teaches GIS, digital mapping and geodesy. Expertise include transportation, crowdsourced geodata, location-based services and data quality.
We are an interdisciplinary team of scientists dedicated to providing solutions that address coastal flooding and sea level rise. Our expertise ranges from data science to environmental modeling that allow us to look at the issue from different perspectives.
