Incorporating River Ice into Flood Inundation Mapping from NOAA's National Water Model

National Water Model v3.0 streamflow forecast outputs are post-processed to provide real-time flood inundation mapping for operational hydrologic forecasting. The upgrade of the National Water Model to version 3.0 adds several new components for operational forecasting of snow and ice. NWM version 3.0 now extends model coverage into portions of Alaska, south of the Alaska Range, and integrates a coupled glacier model.

The Water Prediction Operations Division (WPOD) of the NOAA/NWS Office of Water Prediction (OWP) is expanding snow and ice forecasting capabilities by building a service called the Ice Common operating Environment (ICE). The ICE service will prevent National Water Model Flood Inundation Mapping services from using ice affected stream gauges and will develop a common operating picture for river ice for the entire National Weather Service.

The ICE service operates on the National Water Model’s stream network and is supplemented in Alaska by the High Resolution National Hydrologic Database to cover areas not in the NWM stream network. The ICE service harnesses an ArcGIS application to identify ice-affected rivers and ice concentrations based on USGS gauge data, remote sensing, and/or airborne observations. These ice-affected stream reaches will undergo a QC process, and upon meeting those requirements, be ingested into Flood Inundation Mapping services in the AWS Cloud environment used by the NWC’s operational forecasters. A prototype service is expected by November 2023 with testing for use by WPOD operational forecasters during the winter and spring of 2023-2024.