Identifying Flood Risks to Transportation Infrastructure in Texas

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Issue

The Texas Department of Transportation maintains 38,000 miles of roads in the Austin area, and many roads deal with major flooding issues. Accurate road elevation maps are critical to allow the department to be proactive in its flood response.

Process

Texas has many lidar data collections covering the 38,000 miles of roads in the Austin district. Managers used high-performance computing to filter the data collections and select the most accurate and recent data for the road system. They then integrated this with flood modeling layers and NOAA’s high-resolution land cover data to analyze the roads and bridges in a variety of flood scenarios. Several bridges were identified as potentially at risk from future flooding scenarios.

Impact

These elevation models and inundation maps enable the Texas Department of Transportation to be proactive in its flood response and provide better information for citizens and communities, including planning ahead for potential structural failures, impacts to evacuation routes, and even impacts to emergency responder routes during storms. (2025)

Aerial image of road and bridge features
This map shows road and bridge features mapped from NOAA's high-resolution land cover and elevation data to identify flood risks within the transportation network.