Estimating the Value of Weather Radars in Reducing Flash Flood Casualties

A monetized flash flood benefit model is developed for arbitrary weather radar network configurations. Regression analyses indicate that improvement of two key radar parameters—fraction of vertical space observed and cross-range horizontal resolution—lead to better warning performance as characterized by fraction of flash floods warned and false alarm ratio. Enhanced flash flood warning performance, in turn, is shown to reduce casualty rates. The combination of the two statistical relationships allows a geospatial computation of the benefits that meteorological radar coverage provides in reducing flash flood casualties. The model is run on basic contiguous U.S. scenarios—no radar coverage, existing radar coverage, and “perfect” radar coverage—to generate estimates of current benefits and the remaining pool of benefits. This work is a follow-up to a similar radar benefit model recently developed for tornadoes^†.

^†Cho, J. Y. N., and J. M. Kurdzo, 2019: Weather radar network benefit model for tornadoes. J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., 58, 971–987, https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-18-0205.1.

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release: distribution unlimited. This material is based upon work supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Air Force Contract No. FA8702-15-D-0001. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.