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1. Heading for the Hills? Effects of Community Flood Management on Local Adaptation to Flood Risks: Management and Adaptation to Flood Risks

   https://doi.org/10.1002/soej.12340  

   Noonan, Douglas S. ; Liu, Xian ( January 2019 , Southern Economic Journal)

   The Community Rating System (CRS) program was implemented by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1990 as an optional program to encourage communities to voluntarily engage in flood mitigation initiatives. This article uses national census tract-level data from 1980 to 2010 to estimate whether CRS participation and flood risk affect a community's local patterns of population change. We employ an instrumental-variables strategy to address the potential endogeneity of CRS participation, based on community-scale demographic factors that predict when a tract’s host community joins the CRS. The results find significant effects of the CRS program and flood risk on population change. Taken together, the findings point to greater propensity for community-scale flood management in areas with more newcomers and programs such as CRS stabilizing population, though not especially in flood- prone areas. We observe the CRS neither displacing population toward lower-risk areas nor attracting more people to flood-prone areas. 

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2. Collaborative Modeling With Fine‐Resolution Data Enhances Flood Awareness, Minimizes Differences in Flood Perception, and Produces Actionable Flood Maps

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2019EF001391  

   Sanders, Brett F. ; Schubert, Jochen E. ; Goodrich, Kristen A. ; Houston, Douglas ; Feldman, David L. ; Basolo, Victoria ; Luke, Adam ; Boudreau, Dani ; Karlin, Beth ; Cheung, Wing ; et al ( January 2020 , Earth's Future)
3. The complexities of urban flood response: Flood frequency analyses for the Charlotte metropolitan region: THE COMPLEXITIES OF URBAN FLOOD RESPONSE

   https://doi.org/10.1002/2016WR019997  

   Zhou, Zhengzheng ; Smith, James A. ; Yang, Long ; Baeck, Mary Lynn ; Chaney, Molly ; Ten Veldhuis, Marie-Claire ; Deng, Huiping ; Liu, Shuguang ( August 2017 , Water Resources Research)
4. Intercomparison of Automated Near-Real-Time Flood Mapping Algorithms Using Satellite Data and DEM-Based Methods: A Case Study of 2022 Madagascar Flood

   https://doi.org/10.3390/hydrology10010017  

   Li, Wenzhao ; Li, Dongfeng ; Fang, Zheng N. ( January 2023 , Hydrology)

   Numerous algorithms have been developed to automate the process of delineating water surface maps for flood monitoring and mitigation purposes by using multiple sources such as satellite sensors and digital elevation model (DEM) data. To better understand the causes of inaccurate mapping information, we aim to demonstrate the advantages and limitations of these algorithms through a case study of the 2022 Madagascar flooding event. The HYDRAFloods toolbox was used to perform preprocessing, image correction, and automated flood water detection based on the state-of-the-art Edge Otsu, Bmax Otsu, and Fuzzy Otsu algorithms for the satellite images; the FwDET tool was deployed upon the cloud computing platform (Google Earth Engine) for rapid estimation of flood area/depth using the digital elevation model (DEM) data. Generated surface water maps from the respective techniques were evaluated qualitatively against each other and compared with a reference map produced by the European Union Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS). The DEM-based maps show generally overestimated flood extents. The satellite-based maps show that Edge Otsu and Bmax Otsu methods are more likely to generate consistent results than those from Fuzzy Otsu. While the synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) data are typically favorable over the optical image under undesired weather conditions, maps generated based on SAR data tend to underestimate the flood extent as compared with reference maps. This study also suggests the newly launched Landsat-9 serves as an essential supplement to the rapid delineation of flood extents. 

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5. Recognizing flood exposure inequities across flood frequencies

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2023.100371  

   Selsor, Haley ; Bledsoe, Brian P. ; Lammers, Roderick ( June 2023 , Anthropocene)

   Urban flooding is a growing threat due to land use and climate change. Vulnerable populations tend to have greater exposure to flooding as a result of historical societal and institutional processes. Most flood vulnerability studies focus on a single large flood, neglecting the impact of small, frequent floods. Therefore, there is a need to investigate inequitable flood exposure across a range of event magnitudes and frequencies. To explore this question, we develop a novel score of inequitable flood risk by defining risk as a function of frequency, exposure, and vulnerability. This analysis combines high-resolution, parcel-scale compounded fluvial and pluvial flood data with census data at the census block group scale. We focus on six census tracts within Athens-Clarke County, Georgia that are highly developed with diverse populations. We define vulnerable populations as non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and households under the poverty level and use dasymetric mapping techniques to calculate the over-representation of these populations in flood zones. Inequitable risks at each census tract (approximately neighborhood scale) were estimated for multiple (e.g., 5-, 10-, 20-, 50-, and 100-year) flood return periods. Results show that the relatively greatest flood risk inequities occur for the 10-year flood and not at the largest event. We also found that the size of inequity is dynamic, depending on the flood magnitude. Therefore, addressing a range of events including smaller, more frequent floods can increase equity and reveal opportunities that may be missed if only one event is considered. 

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