Identifying Potential Flooding Events in New England

Abstract

A 10-year objective climatology of potential flooding events in New England was created using a python script and National Weather Service (NWS) warnings, watches, and advisories (WWAs). The dataset ranged from October 1st 2008 to September 30th 2018 and was sourced from the Iowa State archived NWS GIS shapefile database. Using six NWS weather forecast offices, the data was filtered to only include flood related WWAs. A python script was created to identify events from exported comma separated value (CSV) files using the issued date and time. A separate event was defined by a time difference of six hours between issued time. The results concluded that on average there are 75 events per year that lead the NWS to issue flooding WWAs ranging from ~50 to ~100 events per year. Possible future work entails looking into the meteorological drivers of these events