John J. Aguinaldo | USGS Science

USGS2017

Delivering integrated HAZUS-MH flood loss analyses and flood inundation maps over the Web

Catastrophic flooding is responsible for more loss of life and damages to property than any other natural hazard. Recently developed flood inundation mapping technologies make it possible to view the extent and depth of flooding on the land surface over the Internet; however, by themselves these technologies are unable to provide estimates of losses to property and infrastructure. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA's) HAZUS-MH software is extensively used to conduct flood loss analyses in the United States, providing a nationwide database of population and infrastructure at risk. Unfortunately, HAZUS-MH requires a dedicated Geographic Information System (GIS) workstation and a trained operator, and analyses are not adapted for convenient delivery over the Web. This article describes a cooperative effort by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and FEMA to make HAZUS-MH output GIS and Web compatible and to integrate these data with digital flood inundation maps in USGS’s newly developed Inundation Mapping Web Portal. By running the computationally intensive HAZUS-MH flood analyses offline and converting the output to a Web-GIS compatible format, detailed estimates of flood losses can now be delivered to anyone with Internet access, thus dramatically increasing the availability of these forecasts to local emergency planners and first responders.

Journal of Emergency Management↗

USGS2006

EMMMA: A web-based system for environmental mercury mapping, modeling, and analysis

Mercury in our environment - in our air, water, soil, and especially our food - poses significant hazards to human health, particularly for developing fetuses and young children. Because of the importance of this issue and the length of time it has been studied, large and complex data sets of mercury concentrations in various media and associated ancillary data have been generated by many Federal, State, Tribal, and local agencies. To facilitate efficient and effective use of these data in managing and mitigating human and wildlife exposure to mercury, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences have developed a website for visualizing and studying the distribution of mercury in our environment. The Environmental Mercury Mapping, Modeling, and Analysis (EMMMA) website (http://emmma.usgs.gov) provides health and environmental researchers, managers, and other decision-makers the ability to: 1) Interactively view and access a nationwide collection of environmental mercury data (fish tissue, atmospheric emissions and deposition, stream sediments, soils, and coal) and mercuryrelated data (mine locations); 2) Interactively view and access predictions of the National Descriptive Model of Mercury in Fish (NDMMF) at 4,976 sites and 6,829 sampling events (events are unique combinations of site and sampling date) across the United States; and 3) Use interactive mapping and graphing capabilities to visualize spatial and temporal trends and study relationships between mercury and other variables.

Open-File Report↗