Flood Risk Assessment of Complex Riverine Systems

For over two decades, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has required that all of their planning processes address the Nation's water resources needs in a systems context. Corps policy also requires that all flood damage reduction studies adopt risk analysis. While the USACE has these requirements, there is little guidance and few tools to support them. For this reason, the USACE Institute for Water Resources (IWR) sponsored investigations into the development of a new tool to analyze complex riverine systems while implementing the current flood risk analysis and systems requirements. This new tool, currently called HEC-FRM or Flood Risk Management, is the next generation of the Hydrologic Engineering Center's Flood Damage Analysis (HEC-FDA) model. This paper will present the model development for this tool which will be used for levee certification and assessment, planning and design studies, and advance the Corps modeling approach for risk analysis.