Flood Safety Awareness for the Lower Rio Grande Valley: Advanced Hydrologic Prediction System

The Advanced Hydrologic Prediction System (AHPS) provides water prediction and delivery methods to serve your needs and the needs of all our partners in protecting life and property ranging from floods to droughts.

AHPS provides you with user friendly text and graphical forecasts that are available online. The goal of these products is to help emergency managers to be better prepared to defend their communities from floods, and helps recreational water users stay out of harms way. AHPS enables you to get reliable answers to such questions as:

Inundation Mapping
After the Rio Grande Flood of 2010, NOAA/National Weather Service West Gulf River Forecast Center, Southern Region Headquarters, and the Brownsville/Rio Grande Valley office collaborated with the International Boundary and Water Commission and local emergency managers to improve the ability to depict potential flood events along unimproved sections of the Rio Grande in the Upper Valley (Starr/southwest Hidalgo County) by providing inundation maps (right) for the river gage at Rio Grande City. The project was completed in 2012, and the website and data are now available. Inundation mapping is part of a long term goal of improving weather readiness by providing easy to understand maps for decision makers to best determine where and when evacuations should occur in advance of life-threatening flooding. Each map extends well beyond the gaging point itself; ultimately, additional gages and the increased use of geographic information systems will allow most river forecasts to include inundation zones, including the height of the water above ground, in all potential flood areas.

Click on the map to view and experiment with the Rio Grande City inundation map. For starters, mouse over the flood crest values on the left hand side and watch the inundation area expand and contract. Follow the instructions to determine water depth at any location in the shaded area. The map indicates the scope of inundation from the Falcon Dam releases following Hurricane Alex in 2010 (flood stage of 57 feet above North American Vertical Datum 1988).

The National Weather Service added even more enhancements to the AHPS pages in spring 2012. Known as "Phase VII Enhancements", they included:

National and Regional NWS Hydrology Information
Weather Prediction Center (WPC), based outside of Washington, DC, has an expert staff dedicated to forecasting precipitation amounts across the country. These forecasters specialize in interpreting the increasing variety of regional, national, and global forecast models depiction of quantitative precipitation (QPF) and apply their experience and knowledge of bias and error to create deterministic and probabilistic forecasts of how much rain might fall in one, two, three, five, and seven days. Often, WPC QPF forecasters will collaborate with regional River Forecast Centers (below) and local offices such as NWS Brownsville/Rio Grande Valley to create the best possible forecast for a critical event such as a slow moving, rain–laden front or an approaching storm system. An example of a WPC QPF graphic for the Rio Grande Valley is shown at right.

West Gulf River Forecast Center (WGRFC), based in Fort Worth, has an expert staff dedicated to forecasting the impacts of heavy rain on water flows along rivers, creeks, and streams that flow into the Gulf of Mexico. These include the Lower Colorado River near Austin, the Trinity River near Dallas, and the Rio Grande (right). Hydrologists at WGRFC evaluate rain forecasts, rainfall observations, and water flows to create river forecasts and river flood warning guidance when the potential for rivers, creeks, streams, and lakes could flood nearby and downstream communities. WGRFC hydrologists and meteorologists collaborate with a variety of governmental partners across two borders, including the United States Geological Survey, the International Boundary and Water Commission, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and many more. WGRFC is a critical part of NWS Brownsville/Rio Grande Valley flood warning operations for the Rio Grande and the Lower Rio Grande Flood Control Project (Floodway).