United States Flood Database

THIS VERSION IS DEPRECATED! PLEASE DIRECT TO VERSION 1.1

This dataset is a merged and unified one from seven individual datasets, making it the longest records ever and wide coverage in the US for flood studies. All individual databases and a unified database are provided to accommodate different user needs. It is anticipated that this database can support a variety of flood-related research, such as a validation resource for hydrologic or hydraulic simulations, climatic studies concerning spatiotemporal patterns of floods given this long-term and U.S.-wide coverage, and flood susceptibility analysis for vulnerable geophysical locations.

Description of filenames:

1. cyberFlood_1104.csv – web-based crowdsourced flood database, developed at the University of Oklahoma (Wan et al., 2014). 203 flood events from 1998 to 2008 are retrieved with the latest version. Data accessed on 11/04/2020.

Data attributes: ID, Year, Month, Day, Duration, fatality, Severity, Cause, Lat, Long, Country Code, Continent Code

2. DFO.xlsx – the Dartmouth Flood Observatory flood database. It is a tabular form of global flood database, collected from news, government agencies, stream gauges, and remote sensing instruments from 1985 to the present. Data accessed on 10/27/2020.

Data attributes: ID, GlodeNumber, Country, OtherCountry, long, lat, Area, Began, Ended, Validation, Dead, Displaced, MainCause, Severity

3. emdat_public_2020_11_01_query_uid-MSWGVQ.xlsx – Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT). This flood report is managed by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Belgium, which contains all types of global natural disasters from 1900 to the present. Data accessed on 11/01/2020.

Data attributes: Dis No, Year, Seq, Disaster Group, Disaster Subgroup, Disaster Type, Disaster Subtype, Disaster Subsubtype, Event Nane, Entity Criteria, Country, ISO, Region, Continent, Location, Origin, Associated Disaster, Associated Disaster2, OFDA Response, Appeal, Declaration, Aid Contribution, Disaster Magnitude, Latitude, Longitude, Local Time, River Basin, Start Year, Start Month, Start Day, End Year, End Month, End Day, Total Death, No. Injured, No. Affected, No. Homeless, Total Affected, Reconstruction, Insured Damages, Total Damages, CPI

4. extracted_events_NOAA.csv – The national weather service storm reports. The NOAA NWS team collects weather-related natural hazards from 1950 to the present. Data accessed on 10/27/2020.

Data attributes: BEGIN_YEARMONTH, BEGIN_DAY, BEGIN_TIME, END_YEARMONTH, END_DAY, END_TIME, EPISODE_ID, EVENT_ID, STATE, STATE_FIPS, YEAR, MONTH_NAME, EVENT_TYPE, CZ_TYPE, CZ_FIPS, CZ_NAME, WFO, BEGIN_DATETIME, CZ_TIMEZONE, END_DATE_TIME, INJURIES_DIRECT, INJURIES_INDIRECT, DEATHS_DIRECT, DEATHS_INDIRECT, DAMAGE_PROPERTY, DAMAGE_CROPS, SOURCE, MAGNITUDE, MAGNITUDE_TYPE, FLOOD CAUSE, CATEGORY, TOR_F_SCALE< TOR_LENGTH, TOR_WIDTH, TOR_OTHER_WFO, TOR_OTHER_CZ_STATE, TOR_OTHER_CZ_FIPS, BEGIN_RANGE, BEGIN_AZIMUTH, BEGIN_LOCATION, END_RANGE, END_AZIMUTH, END_LOCATION, BEGIN_LAT, BEGIN_LON, END_LAT, END_LON, EPISODE_NARRATIVE, EVENT_NARRATIVE, DATA_SOURCE 

5. FEDB_1118.csv – The University of Connecticut Flood Events Database. Floods retrieved from 6,301 stream gauges in the U.S. after flow separation from 2002 to 2013 (Shen et al., 2017). Data accessed on 11/18/2020.

Data attributes: STCD, StartTimeP, EndTimeP, StartTimeF, EndTimeF, Perc, Peak, RunoffCoef, IBF, Vp, Vb, Vt, Pmean, ETr, ELs, VarTr, VarLs, EQ, Q2, CovTrLs, Category, Geometry

6. GFM_events.csv – Global Flood Monitoring dataset. It is a crowdsourcing flood database derived from Twitter tweets over the globe since 2014. Data accessed on 11/9/2020.

Data attributes: event_id, location_ID, location_ID_url, name, type, country_location_ID, country_ISO3, start, end, time of detection

7. mPing_1030.csv – meteorological Phenomena Identification Near the Ground (mPing). The mPing app is a crowdsourcing, weather-reporting software jointly developed by NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) and the University of Oklahoma (Elmore et al., 2014). Data accessed on 10/30/2020.

Data attributes: id, obtime, category, description, description_id, lon, lat

8. USFD_v1.0.csv – A merged United States Flood Database from 1900 to the present. 

Data attributes: DATE_BEGIN, DATE_END, DURATION, LON, LAT, COUNTRY, STATE, AREA, FATALITY, DAMAGE, SEVERITY, SOURCE, CAUSE, SOURCE_DB, SOURCE_ID, DESCRIPTION, SLOPE, DEM, LULC, DISTANCE_RIVER, CONT_AREA, DEPTH, YEAR.

Details of attributes:

DATE_BEGIN: begin datetime of an event. yyyymmddHHMMSS

DATE_END: end datetime of an event. yyyymmddHHMMSS

DURATION: duration of an event in hours

LON: longitude in degrees

LAT: latitude in degrees

COUNTRY: United States of America

STATE: US state name

AREA: affected areas in km^2

FATALITY: number of fatalities

DAMAGE: economic damages in US dollars

SEVERITY: event severity, (1/1.5/2) according to DFO.

SOURCE: flood information source.

CAUSE: flood cause.

SOURCE_DB: source database from item 1-7.

SOURCE_ID: original ID in the source database.

DESCRIPTION: event description

SLOPE: calculated slope based on SRTM DEM 90m

DEM: Digital Elevation Model

LULC: Land Use Land Cover

DISTANCE_RIVER: distance to major river network in km,

CONT_AREA: contributing area (km^2), from MERIT Hydro

DEPTH: 500-yr flood depth

YEAR: year of the event.

9. attribution_table.xlsx – description of each database, and URLs are provided to retrieve these databases.

The script to merge all sources and figure plots can be found in https://github.com/chrimerss/USFD.

If you intend to use this dataset, please cite our description paper:

Li, Z., Chen, M., Gao, S., Gourley, J. J., Yang, T., Shen, X., Kolar, R., and Hong, Y.: A multi-source 120-year US flood database with a unified common format and public access, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 13, 3755–3766, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-3755-2021, 2021.