Rice improves lifesaving Flood Alert System
Google maps added to flood-warning system for Texas Medical Center

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

The flood-warning system that protects the world’s largest medical center — Houston’s Texas Medical Center (TMC) — has been updated with Web-based maps that allow users to see how impending floods will impact particular neighborhoods, streets and buildings in the Brays Bayou watershed.

Rice University researchers unveiled the third generation of their Web-based Flood Alert System (FAS3) this week. FAS3 uses a free mapping service provided by Google that enables users to see how much flooding will occur in the next 60-90 minutes.

“With the addition of Google maps, we’re presenting real-time flood warnings in the most accessible, easily understood way possible,” said FAS3 creator Phil Bedient, Rice’s Herman Brown Professor of Engineering and the director of Rice’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center (SSPEED). “If you live in the service area, FAS3 has the power to give you a real-time perspective on flood conditions and possible evacuation routes.”

Bedient’s first version of FAS went live in 1997. Its most notable success came in June 2001, when Tropical Storm Allison dumped more than 14 inches of rain over portions of Houston in a 12-hour span. The resulting floods inundated the TMC and caused some $2 billion damage. But thanks to good planning and a 90-minute warning from FAS, lives and property were saved in the 6,000-bed medical complex.

Early flood-warning systems like FAS3 protect both infrastructure and human life by issuing advanced warnings that are based on sophisticated computer models that determine how much rainfall runoff is headed downstream.

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The heart of FAS is a computer model that predicts flow rates and water levels in Brays Bayou, a heavily urbanized watershed that drains portions of Houston and six surrounding suburbs in Harris and Fort Bend counties. The 1,000-acre TMC, which includes Rice’s campus and 13 hospitals that see some 6 million patients per year, straddles Brays Bayou.

“The hydrologic models in FAS contain a detailed database of land use and soil types for each parcel of land within the bayou’s 127-square-mile watershed,” said FAS3 co-creator Nick Fang, a research engineer in civil and environmental engineering at Rice. “FAS also gathers real-time radar rainfall data over those parcels. The rainfall data is run through the model, which predicts how much water will be flowing in the Brays channel within the next 60-90 minutes.”

FAS has successfully predicted flood levels for more than 40 major storm events, including Tropical Storm Frances in 1998 and Hurricane Ike in 2008. FAS was updated in 2004 with technology that incorporated more accurate NEXRAD radar rainfall estimates. This and other improvements helped the second generation of FAS to provide warnings further in advance of impending floods.

In addition to Google maps, FAS3 incorporates some of the first floodplain maps in the nation that were compiled with LIDAR, a state-of-the-art topographic technique that uses light detection and ranging technology. Bedient said the new maps will boost the system’s accuracy. Other new features in FAS3 are real-time traffic information and a map that shows water levels at the State Highway 288 bridge over Brays Bayou, a critical evacuation route. Features still under construction include the ability for users to call up maps for a particular street address.

“FAS3 also contains improvements ‘under the hood,’ which users won’t see directly,” said Jerry Fowler, a Rice alumnus computer scientist who has worked with Bedient since 2001 on improvements to FAS. “The site employs Asynchronous Javascript and XML technology that automatically refreshes the information on a user’s browser every few minutes.”

Fowler, director of bioinformatics at the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in the medical center, earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Rice in 1995 and began working with Bedient on improvements to FAS in 2001.

Bedient said the SSPEED center is working with city officials and others in the Houston region to implement flood-alert systems along the Houston Ship Channel and in suburban Sugar Land.

“The technology is inexpensive for a governmental agency to provide its citizens, and we have proven time and again that it’s effective,” Bedient said. “It’s high time for more communities to get involved, and SSPEED is ready to help.”