Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

997

Date

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Civil Engineering

Concentration

Environmental Engineering

Committee Chair

Brian A Waldron

Committee Member

Arleen A Hill

Committee Member

Dorian J Burnette

Abstract

Flood zones with 1% and 0.02% of annual flooding chance are projected in the ‎Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) digital flood insurance rate maps ‎‎(DFIRMs) and are suited for identifying flood risk at the largest impacts. However, less ‎severe floods, which are not mapped in DFIRMs, still cause significant damage and ‎occur on a more frequent basis. This article employs an easy-to-setup GIS-based ‎solution for rapid inundation mapping of small flood events. The linear interpolation ‎technique (LITE Flood) is developed to rescale the hydraulic behavior inherent with a ‎larger flood event without performing additional hydraulic simulations. The approach is ‎evaluated by comparing the results to the corresponding storm scenarios simulated in ‎the HEC-RAS, a standard river hydraulics simulator. The case study is a portion of the ‎Wolf River and its two main tributaries in Shelby County that is located in the southwest ‎corner of Tennessee, USA, where stream channelization mitigated large flood events but ‎has caused frequent flooding from less severe storms. Results indicate that LITE Flood ‎can be used to delineate more frequent storm events, thereby aiding local community ‎emergency response agencies who often do not have the expertise to perform more ‎sophisticated hydraulic modeling but do have a GIS capacity.‎

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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