Enhancing Oklahoma’s Transportation Infrastructure Network Against Floods: From Precipitation Information to Structural Damage and Road Closures – a Pilot Study

Flooding has unfolded as another pressing natural hazard that causes significant damage and disturbances to transportation infrastructure that is central in any recovery effort. With current trends demonstrating an increase in the frequency of more extreme weather phenomena, flooding impact is expected to grow significantly in both urban and rural settings of Oklahoma and the broader Region 6. While extreme events have been traditionally accommodated in the design of any transportation project by using statistical, stationary estimates about the design water level and flashiness, such approach is no longer valid under a changing climate. Efforts should be made in shifting the design and restoration processes of existing infrastructure towards updated estimates that better capture new extremes and their impact on the transportation infrastructure. In particular, state and interstate highways are typically designed with stricter performance criteria than local rural support infrastructure. Addressing these gaps in the designing process requires a comprehensive tool that can assess flooding risk with high resolution and high accuracy by identifying locations within an urban or rural environment where the network should be improved. The proposed project will focus on providing a complete and transferable-to-any-region framework that estimates from flood levels based on weather radar precipitation all the way up to identifying transportation infrastructure that will be challenged to perform at a service level or to maintain its structural integrity under extreme loads. Data-driven models that relate flood characteristics with the spatial distribution of precipitation and are trained with physics-based hydraulic simulations will be leveraged to provide fast and accurate estimates of the flood levels at high spatial resolution. The pilot study demonstrating the framework’s capabilities will be developed over an area of Oklahoma that highlights local transportation infrastructure and its resilience. Probabilistic flood estimates will offer a high-resolution and information-rich vulnerability assessment for the investigated community. This will be important for state and local stakeholder decision-making on available funds and prioritization of local infrastructure necessitating interventions to remain operational. The following tasks will be pursued in this study. Task 1: Develop a methodology to relate precipitation and flood characteristics, which will allow flood predictions under a probabilistic setting. Task 2: Develop the modeling system that captures the meteorology, hydrology and hydraulic aspects of the flooding and employ the system for a case study in Oklahoma. Task 3: Using the information developed in Task#1, develop a representative small ensemble of events that can occur within the region of interest and the corresponding different probabilities of occurrence (ranging from frequent to rare events) and produce flooding extents using the developed modeling system. Task 4: Use machine learning and surrogate modeling (Gaussian Process) that fits best the needs of the phenomenon (flooding water levels) and the size of the training database that will be developed in Task#3. Task 5: Identify transportation infrastructure that is vulnerable to flooding in collaboration with Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT) and by using online databases.

• Record URL:
  • https://www.sptc.org/cy2-ou-01

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $148,858.00
• Contract Numbers:

  CY2-OU-01

  69A3552348306

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  Southern Plains Transportation Center

  University of Oklahoma
  202 W Boyd St, Room 213A
  Norman, OK  United States  73019
• Project Managers:

  Dunn, Denise

• Performing Organizations:

  University of Oklahoma, Norman

  School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science
  202 West Boyd Street, Room 334
  Norman, OK  United States  73019
• Principal Investigators:

  Dresback, Kendra

  Kirstetter , Pierre-Emmanuel

  Kyprioti, Aikaterini P

• Start Date: 20241001
• Expected Completion Date: 20250930
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Estimating; Floods; Infrastructure; Machine learning; Precipitation (Meteorology); Risk assessment; Transportation planning
• Geographic Terms: Oklahoma
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Environment; Hydraulics and Hydrology; Planning and Forecasting; Transportation (General);

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01941677
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Southern Plains Transportation Center
• Contract Numbers: CY2-OU-01, 69A3552348306
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Jan 1 2025 2:02PM