An Analysis and Demonstration of the National Water Model’s Applicability to Community Resilience Planning

With global temperatures on the rise, communities across the United States face new and heightened threats from water-based natural disasters. The growing frequency of coastal and inland flooding has strained existing capacity in already-vulnerable communities and created new vulnerabilities in many previously low-risk areas. Governments at all levels, from the federal to municipal, have embraced resilience planning as a means of predicting, mitigating, and adapting to the threats posed by a changing climate. A growing number of climate services have been developed to aid communities engaged in these planning efforts to access, interpret, and make decisions with climate-related data and information. An important tool for potentially supporting this planning is the National Water Model (NWM), created by NOAA’s National Water Center (NWC). The NWM is a river and streamflow model that can forecast conditions for the continental United States. Although the NWM was developed to provide a robust and adaptable framework for water planning across the continental United States, communities have been slow to integrate the NWM into their resilience planning efforts.

In Phase 1 of this study, six geographically diverse communities (Portland, OR; Boulder, CO; Minneapolis, MN; Charlotte, NC; Cincinnati, OH; and Burlington, VT) were engaged in a series of interviews to better understand how resilience-related planning operates in practice, their existing knowledge of the NWM, and their perspectives on how the NWM could be applied to their work planning for water-related vulnerabilities and hazards. Additionally, this study conducted a complementary set of interviews with NOAA and NWC staff to understand their perspectives. Each community and NOAA/NWC staff were then invited to participate in a collaborative session to co-generate recommendations for how the NWM could be used in community resilience planning and how the NWC could facilitate this use. Results from this study have yielded important insights on both the potential of and barriers to using the NWM in community resilience planning. These insights inform a series of recommendations around four groupings: (1) potential use cases of the NWM in community resilience-related planning, (2) how to raise awareness of the NWM, (3) how to improve its accessibility to diverse community stakeholders, and (4) what features and capabilities community end-users are looking for in the NWM to better assist their resilience planning.

This study not only provides a set of actionable steps that can be taken to connect the NWM to a new, disciplinarily diverse set of stakeholders, it also demonstrates a method of community engagement that can be replicated in other NOAA service delivery capacities. Phase 2 of this project, which is currently in its early stages, will apply three of the top recommendations from Phase 1 to demonstrate the NWM’s use in community resilience-related planning and increase the accessibility of the model for a new group of end-users. Phase 2 will collaborate with stakeholders from Phase 1 to develop (1) applied use cases of the NWM to their resilience-related work, (2) a comparison of the NWM to other existing resources to increase its accessibility, and (3) a set of materials on the NWM that have been tailored to specific non-hydrologist audiences.