The Use of Unmanned Aerial System Imagery in the 2018–19 Mississippi River Flood Event to Enhance NWS Flood Forecasting and Decision Support Services

The NWS Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center (LMRFC) and NOAA’s Northern Gulf Institute (NGI) continue to explore the capabilities of unmanned aerial systems to improve LMRFC impact-based decision support services and forecasting operations. This partnership began in 2014 with overflights of the lower Pearl River basin of southeastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. These flights were used to help develop a hydraulic river model to produce total-water level simulations by capturing the combined effects of surge, tides, waves, and fresh water flows for specific locations in this coastal watershed. In 2018, the FAA selected MSU as the FAA 's Center of Excellence (COE) for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). Working through 23 research institutions and a hundred leading industry and government partners known as the Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence (ASSURE), MSU and NGI identified additional UAS platforms and data transfer processes to investigate the possibility of delivering near-real-time high-resolution imagery to NWS RFCs. In mid-January 2019, NGI and LMRFC successfully demonstrated the capability to bring in UAS data in near real time to LMRFC to support forecast operations. As a result of this successful proof-of-concept, MSU/NGI pilots and their affiliated data experts began looking at ways to use this capability to help visualize the movement of Mississippi River water upstream into communities on the Yazoo, Big Black, and Sunflower Rivers of the Mississippi Delta.

In February 2019, UAS platforms captured the impact of flood crests on the Yalobusha River in the vicinity of Greenwood, MS and areas in the Yazoo River basin. Building on this success, in April 2019, NOAA's Northern Gulf Institute (NGI) and Mississippi State University's Raspet Flight Research Laboratory completed two UAS operations to capture imagery as flood crests occurred on the Mississippi River at its confluence with the Arkansas River and then just downstream at Greenville, MS. This presentation will show the imagery gathered by these three flight operations in spring and summer 2019 using a 95-pound UAV and a 180-pound UAV that imaged 300 square miles in 6 flight hours at 15 cm resolution including the data plan where lower resolution imagery was sent to LMRFC for near-real time flood predictions and situational awareness with higher resolution data post-processed to use in model validation and verification. We will also discuss the positive outcomes for LMRFC forecast operations by looking at visible imagery, NIR imagery, and derived products in near real-time for communities in the vicinity of Arkansas City, AR and Greenwood, MS.