Climate Change Scenario Inundation Metrics along the Upper and Middle Mississippi and Lower Missouri Rivers

Project Title:  View help for Project Title Climate Change Scenario Inundation Metrics along the Upper and Middle Mississippi and Lower Missouri Rivers

Summary:  View help for Summary Within large-river ecosystems, floodplains serve a variety of important ecological functions. A recent survey of 80 managers of floodplain conservation lands along the Upper and Middle Mississippi and Lower Missouri Rivers in the central United States found that the most critical information needed to improve floodplain management centered on metrics for characterizing depth, extent, frequency, duration, and timing of inundation. These metrics can be delivered to managers efficiently through cloud-based interactive maps. To calculate these metrics, we interpolated an existing one-dimensional HEC-RAS hydraulic model for the Lower Missouri River, which simulated water surface elevations at cross sections spaced (<1 kilometer) to sufficiently characterize water surface profiles along an approximately 800 kilometer stretch upstream from the confluence with the Mississippi River over an 80-year record at a daily time step. To translate these water surface elevations to inundation depths, we subtracted a merged terrain model consisting of floodplain LIDAR and bathymetric surveys of the river channel. We completed these calculations for an 800 kilometer stretch of the Missouri River, spanning from Rulo, Nebraska to the river's confluence with the Mississippi River. This approach resulted in a 29,000+ day time series of inundation depths across the floodplain using grid cells with 30 meter spatial resolution. This dataset presents 17 metrics for each of two scenarios, one using a baseline timeseries of stages from the HEC-RAS simulation and one using a timeseries of stages adjusted to account for changes in discharge under one possible climate change scenario. These metrics are calculated on a per pixel basis and encompass a variety of temporal criteria generally relevant to flora and fauna of interest to floodplain managers, including, for example, the average number of days inundated per year within a growing season. We also include a series of maps of water depths across the floodplain by return interval for each scenario, and the minimum return interval at which each pixel is inundated. Lastly, we include the base elevation layer that we generated to calculate depth of inundation from interpolated water-surface elevations.

Original Distribution URL:  View help for Original Distribution URL https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/5a39636ae4b0d05ee8b411a0

Subject Terms:  View help for Subject Terms environment; floods; floodplains; streamflow; inlandWaters; riversystems

Geographic Coverage:  View help for Geographic Coverage Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Lower Missouri

Time Period(s):  View help for Time Period(s) 3/1/1930 – 12/31/2011

Data Type(s):  View help for Data Type(s) geographic information system (GIS) data