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9/25/2008

Flood-alert system eased fears at Texas Medical Center
Rice researchers “absolutely nailed” Brays Bayou prediction during Ike

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

The Texas Medical Center (TMC) was extremely close to a flood emergency during and after Hurricane Ike.

But because of Rice University, medical center officials were on top of it, allaying fears of the kind of deluge that caused extensive damage during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001.

	PHIL BEDIENT

With stunning accuracy, Rice researchers predicted the peak surge of Brays Bayou during and immediately after Ike. The redundant server system worked despite power outages that shut down the university’s computing center at a critical time.

“The TMC was very happy about how well the system worked and the fact that we were able to pull this off via a long-distance connection,” said Phil Bedient, Rice’s Herman Brown Professor of Engineering and a widely known expert on flood warning and storm surges. “They were very concerned, because if the medical center had gone under, it would have been a mess.”

Bedient, who with the TMC set up a real-time flood alert system in the years since Allison, saw that effort pay off last week. “We absolutely nailed it,” he said. Having lost power at his own Houston home, Bedient spent a long night during Ike evaluating radar rainfall data coming by phone from the National Weather Service’s radar through Vieux & Associates Inc. in Oklahoma and calling medical center officials with his predictions.

“Brays was two feet from going over its banks,” he said. “The measured water flow in the bayou was 25,500 cubic feet per second. We had predicted 26,800, and we predicted it to occur at almost exactly the same time.” The bayou, which runs just to the south of the medical center, floods at 29,000 cubic feet per second, he said.

“It sneaks up on you,” Bedient said. “You don’t know it because the rain’s all happening in the middle of the night. If we’d gotten another inch or two, the bayou would have gone over -- and that inch or two could have come hours later.”

A new paper by Bedient and his colleagues, including Rice research associate Zheng Fang, was published in the current Journal of Hydrologic Engineering and describes a plan to extend the kind of flood warning system that paid off during Ike to all of Greater Houston. Dubbed FAS2 (for flood alert system 2), the system would combine Bedient’s hydrologic models with high-resolution data from the National Weather Service’s Next-Generation Radar and topographic data from an advanced NASA technology called Light Detection And Ranging to predict floods in real time.

“This is the latest-and-greatest version of what we do,” said Bedient. “What we’re building is a floodplain map library, a unique flood-prediction tool that will be launched here, probably, by the end of the year. The concept is to show the floodplains as the rain is falling in much the same way you’d get a body scan at the doctor’s office. We’re getting to that level with our ability to predict where floods will happen.”

The goal, he said, is to provide authorities with information while there’s still time to save lives and property. If a road is likely to go under or a bridge may be washed over, FAS2 will get the word out quickly.

FAS2 is part of the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center (SSPEED), an organization of Gulf Coast universities, emergency managers and public and private partners formed to address deficiencies in storm prediction, disaster planning and evacuations from New Orleans to Brownsville, Texas. Rice is taking the lead of the new center, which was authorized by the state legislature and Gov. Rick Perry last summer.

SSPEED will host a major conference at Rice on severe storm prediction and global climate impact Oct. 29-31.

“The idea of the SSPEED Center is to combine coastal models of storm surge with our inland flooding prediction knowledge, and then get that information out to the transportation folks at the Houston-Galveston Area Council,” said Bedient. “In that way, for the first time, we’ll link severe storm predictions with the decision-makers who can actually make a difference.

“We want to do a better job of disaster information flow,” he said. “At the same time, we’re doing lots of training and bringing expertise together in a way that’s never been done before, because forever and ever, meteorologists have been the only source of data.

“That’s fine -- we love meteorologists. But they always look up, and they don’t look down. We’re doing the evaluation down here on the ground, where the meteorology meets the road.”