Southeast Texas Flood Monitoring Networked Sensors

With the continued risk of flooding in Southeast Texas, Lamar University is working to help the region improves its resiliency during large-scale flooding events. Real-time water stage, elevation, and coordinates in different points of a watershed are essential agents in flood monitoring and mapping. It also helps researchers with hydrological modeling. This data includes the precise positioning of 74 flood-level networked sensors installed in the first phase of this study throughout 7-county regions spanning nearly 6000 square miles in Southeast Texas to achieve the most accurate horizontal and vertical results, 0.4 in. accuracy and lower. Real-time kinematic (RTK) surveying technology concerning the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) has been used as an accurate, rapid, and relatively low-cost surveying method. Each site's thresholds have been established with the aid of these data. Thresholds, real-time relative elevation data of these sensors, and their critical surrounding points are being transmitted to dashboards related to road closures or modeling efforts of mitigation decision-makers, emergency managers, and the public. Furthermore, in the project's next phase, this data was used to propagate flood hydrological models in Southeast Texas watersheds and sub-basins. This data includes relatively exact positions of 74 flood monitoring sites, including the coordinates and elevation (MSL) of the sensors, the top of the banks, the bottom of the ditches, the bottom of the nodes, and some other critical surrounding points like roads and bridges. Furthermore, some important descriptions of the water bodies where the sensors are located have been considered. Moreover, some information regarding the validation of results and also surveying operations and their most accurate benchmarks are available. This project involves the Flood Coordination Study team at Lamar University Center for Resiliency in collaboration with various entities such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, the Southeast Texas Flood Control District, and various other regional agencies, municipalities, and industries. We hope this data works for researchers and hopefully they find it useful for their studies.