Monitoring Flooding using ArcGIS

Flooding can have an enormous impact on public infrastructure, critical facilities, and vulnerable citizens. Most water districts now spend time on flood planning; analyzing the impact of seasonal flooding scenarios and developing flood response plans. Sensors have proven important for ongoing monitoring of water resources, and a key part of many flood plans. Placed in streams, rivers and reservoirs, sensors provide real time data on water levels, flow and volume. Increasingly water districts are pushing this data into ArcGIS. The advantages of this approach include:

1. Creating a system of record – A single central trusted data repository.
2. Publishing the data to a webmap – Easier access to and understanding of the data.
3. ArcGIS analysis – Past trends, future predictions, affected areas and much more.

Sensors and ArcGIS

We worked on a project recently using ArcGIS to map the output from water sensors and provide a simple to use, map-driven web application giving access to this real time data. This was part of an effort to move from a chart/graph based output to map based. The images below are taken from the application. The workflow is as follows:

1. Sensors are overlaid on the map as red points. Click on a point and a pop up shows content and release data with time stamp.

2. Select the ‘More info’ link in the pop up and more detailed data from the sensor is provided in a separate pop up.

3. Select the ‘Site details’ link in the pop up and a new page opens which provides time based data. Users can select the time period to view. Both tabular data can be displayed, as show below:

Graphing this data over the selected time period is another option. Users can view data based on contents and, as is shown below, release to river/stream.

Real time monitoring of water resources is becoming very important, not only for flooding and drought monitoring/planning but for sharing with citizens for recreation.

We are ArcGIS experts, with particular emphasis on water resources. Contact us for more information on 801-733-0723.