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| 12/10/2024 | Advancements in HEC-RAS for Stormwater Modeling, 2D Floodway Evaluation, and More | Eric Tichansky and Cameron Ackerman provided an overview of the latest hydraulic modeling advancements in HEC-RAS including stormwater pipe networks and 2D floodway evaluation tools. HEC-RAS version 6.6 released in September 2024 includes the ability to create stormwater pipe networks and integrate them with 1D and 2D surface elements. The addition of stormwater pipe networks will expand the applicability of HEC-RAS in urban areas, allowing users to analyze the adequacy of stormwater systems and better characterize pluvial flood risk. Also included in HEC-RAS 6.6 are a suite of 2D floodway evaluation tools allowing users to add encroachments to floodways in 2D, discretize the analysis into separate zones, and easily compare encroachment scenarios to base results. | Tichansky, Eric; Ackerman, Cameron | Modeling, Stormwater, Technology | Presentation, Recording and Transcript |
| 11/7/2024 | Iowa Silver Jackets, Iowa Office of Levee Safety, & National Levee Safety Program 3-day Levee Safety Event | Mark Newhall (Iowa Office of Levee Safety), Jason Smith (USACE, Rock Island District) and Mike Bachand (USACE, National Levee Safety Program) discussed a 3-day National Levee Safety event that was hosted by the Iowa Silver Jackets Team in February of this year in conjunction with the team’s Silver Jackets quarterly meeting. The event was an opportunity to discuss moving the nation towards a consistent set of practices for levees; brief the group on available National Levee Safety Program tools and datasets available for Iowa levee systems; discuss the newly-formed Iowa Office of Levee Safety’s goals and objectives; and to celebrate Iowa’s groundbreaking success in passing state legislation establishing a dedicated office and program for levee safety – one of the first states to do so. The event also included a tour of the Cedar Rapids Flood Risk Management System and attendance at a local Levee Safety Town Hall. | Newhall, Mark; Smith, Jason; Bachand, Mike | Levees, Event, Safety, Programs | Presentation, Recording and Transcript |
| 10/22/2024 | FEMA’s New Federal Flood Risk Management Standard (FFRMS) Rule and a Demo of the New Federal Flood Standard Support Tool (FFSST) | Jessica Eleff (FEMA) will be discussing FEMA’s Federal Flood Risk Management Standard (FFRMS) Final Rule and providing an overview of FEMA’s 44 CFR Part 9 rule change, FFRMS policy, and implementation. The purpose of FFRMS is to address future and current flood risk and to ensure projects funded with taxpayer dollars last as long as intended. It accomplishes this by expanding management from the Base Flood Elevation to a higher vertical flood elevation and corresponding horizontal floodplain. Doug Marcy (NOAA) will give a demo of the new Federal Flood Standard Support Tool (FFSST), developed to support decision making and meet the floodplain review expectations of FFRMS. | Eleff, Jessica; Marcy, Doug | Flood Risk, Standard, Support | Presentation, Recording and Transcript |
| 8/20/2024 | Oregon Silver Jackets Team’s Flood Inundation Mapping Workshop & Tabletop Exercise | In September of 2023, the Oregon Silver Jackets team and Benton County hosted a day-long workshop to review various flood inundation mapping products and to work through a series of scenarios to test the uses of the different maps. In addition to regulatory FEMA maps, communities may have access to dam safety inundation maps, new National Weather Service flood inundation maps, USACE flood inundation maps, and state and local maps, among others. Coupled with technical reports and metadata, the delivery of these products can be confusing for floodplain administrators and emergency managers alike. The Oregon Silver Jackets team, recognizing that communities are being provided an increasing number of flood mapping products through individual and unrelated initiatives, decided to prioritize the flood inundation mapping workshop and exercise. Floodplain Managers, Emergency Managers, and Engineering Staff from across the County attended, along with state and federal mapping and Silver Jackets partners. The presenters talked about this experience and share some of the lessons learned derived from the discussions. | Wright, Deanna; Lewis, Toby; Sclafani, Paul | Inundation, Workshop, Exercises | Presentation, Recording and Transcript |
| 6/18/2024 | California Silver Jackets Flood Risk Technical Workshop: NASA LANCE Program, Model of Models, Global Flood Product Agenda, & CA’s Flood Emergency Response Information Exchange | In place of a nationally-hosted Silver Jackets monthly webinar in June, California Silver Jackets is extendied an invitation to their Flood Risk Technical Workshop, featuring flood products, tools, & models from NASA, University of Alabama – Huntington, and the CA Department of Water Resources. This was approved for 1 CEC for Certified Floodplain Managers. Many thanks to the California Silver Jackets! The purpose of this workshop was threefold: 1) Familiarize Silver Jackets partners with new tools to assist with flood risk management 2) Promote connections within Silver Jackets partner agencies 3) Identify opportunities for data to be leveraged in DWR’s Flood Emergency Response Information Exchange (FERIX) | Haile-Selassie, Samson; Hewson, Jenny; Glasscoe, Maggie; Slayback, Dan | Workshop, Model, Response | Recording |
| 5/30/2024 | Silver Jackets Spring 2024 Webinar Series: National Levee Safety Guidelines: A Significant Milestone for Improving Community Flood Resilience | The webinar discussed the National Levee Safety Guidelines, which are currently available for review. The Guidelines, the first of its kind, are a resource of best practices that help achieve nationwide consistency in improving the reliability of levees and resiliency of communities behind levees throughout the United States. With thousands of communities across the country depending on levees to reduce impacts from flooding, this is a significant milestone. Levees are designed, constructed, and managed by various entities. There has been a long-standing need to have a common reference to connect all the important practices related to levees. The guidelines provide a common framework to improve public awareness and serve as a basis for continuous dialogue and improvement of practices well into the future. | Conforti, Tammy | Levees, Guidelines, Safety | Presentation, Recording, and Transcript |
| 5/20/2024 | Silver Jackets Spring 2024 Webinar Series: NOAA's National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) Drought Planning and Mitigation Tools | NOAA’s NIDIS is an integrated information system that coordinates drought monitoring, forecasting, planning, and information at federal, tribal, state, and local levels across the country. NIDIS has been developing regional Drought Early Warning Systems (DEWS) across the U.S., where networks of researchers, academics, resource managers, policymakers, and other stakeholders share information and actions that help communities cope with drought. Developing and implementing regional DEWS allows for responsiveness to particular geographic and hydrologic circumstances, as well as value-added information needs specific to stakeholders in the respective areas. They are also developing and will soon roll out a new Drought Risk and and Resilience Planning program and toolbox. See drought.gov and drought.gov/about/drought-early-warning for more information. USBR’s WaterSMART Program is an umbrella program composed of multiple Federal financial assistance opportunities aimed at increasing water supply reliability through investments and attention to local water conflicts. Through PAS, USACE provides planning level assistance to eligible non-federal partners in managing their water resources. There a two types of planning assistance offered through the PAS program: Comprehensive Plans and Technical Assistance. Nonfederal interests eligible to partner with the Corps include any State, group of States, local government, regional coalition of governmental entities, Federally-recognized Tribes and U.S. Territories. | Follingstad, Gretel; Horsburgh, Caleb; Henggeler, Jennifer | Planning, System, Drought | Presentation, Recording, and Transcript |
| 5/7/2024 | Silver Jackets Spring 2024 Webinar Series: National Water Prediction Services : A New Era for National Weather Service Visualizations and Data Services | The National Weather Service (NWS) recently deployed a new cloud-based data visualization and data services website, known as the National Water Prediction Service (NWPS). This new generation of real-time data services and visualizations represents a dramatic expansion of the actionable public information available for awareness and use during routine and extreme weather conditions. NWPS replaces the long-standing Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service (AHPS) platform as the one-stop portal into NWS water prediction information. This presentation will described the new services and presented a live demonstration. | Ross, Charles | Visualization, Data, Website | Presentation, Recording, and Transcript |
| 4/29/2024 | Realtime Urban and Flash Flood Monitoring with Cameras and Data Fusion: The FloodAware Project | Urban flooding, flash flooding, and nuisance flooding are problems that increasingly threaten property and safety. Detecting, measuring, predicting, and warning about these small-scale floods requires a different approach compared with what we have used in the past for medium-to-large scale rivers. There is a need for affordable monitoring systems that can rapidly detect, record, and communicate flood data that is highly localized. Systems should also leverage the large number of existing “smart city” sensors already available in the urban environment and fuse it with other sensor systems. Northern Arizona University researchers, in coordination with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have spent the past 5 years engineering and field-testing such a system. In this session you will get to see the product of this work – FloodAware – and hear from the developers about plans to roll out the system. | Ruddell, Ben | Flooding, System, Monitoring | Presentation, Recording and Transcript |
| 3/20/2024 | FEMA's National Rollout of the FY23 Swift Current Funding Opportunity | Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has introduced an exciting new funding opportunity called Swift Current. Swift Current is offered under Flood Mitigation Assistance and provides funding to mitigate buildings insured through the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) after a major flood-related disaster declaration, in order to reduce risk against future flood damage. A total of $300 million in funding is available under the Fiscal Year 2023 Notice of Funding Opportunity, which was made possible by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), better known as Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). Funds will be made available to states, territories, and federally recognized tribal governments that receive a major disaster declaration following a flood-related disaster event and meet all other eligibility criteria. | Teltschik, Shandi | Insurance, Flood, Infrastructure | Presentation, Recording and Transcript |
| 2/27/2024 | NOAA Atlas: Planned Updates to the Nation's Precipitation Frequency Estimates | The webinar discussed plans for NOAA Atlas updates across the nation, in particular, for the development of NOAA Atlas 15. In 2022 NOAA received first-ever direct Federal funding under the 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) to (1) update the NOAA Atlas 14 precipitation frequency standard while accounting for climate change, and (2) develop precipitation frequency estimates for the entire U.S. and its territories. NOAA Atlas 15 will incorporate nonstationary approaches and be derived from climate model outputs to project precipitation frequency estimates into the future. | Salas, Fernando | Precipitation Forecasting, Precipitation, Meteorology, Climatic Changes, Modeling, Atlas, Precipitation | Presentation, Recording, and Transcript |
| 1/23/2024 | FHWA’s Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative Efficient, and Cost-Saving Transportation (PROTECT) Formula & Discretionary Grant Program | The webinar explained FHWA’s the new Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-Saving Transportation (PROTECT) Formula and the Discretionary Grant Programs that were established under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The goal of these funds are to help make surface transportation more resilient to natural hazards, including climate change, sea level rise, flooding, extreme weather events, and other natural. | Williams, Lamin | Transportation, Grants-in-aid, Infrastructure, Law, Programs | Presentations, Recording and Transcript |
| 11/13/2023 | Silver Jackets & State Hazard Mitigation Teams’ Best Practices Project | This webinar introduced a new effort getting underway that will collect feedback on best practices from leads of the interagency state teams and other partners. Joe Chandler, FEMA Region VII and Brian Rast, USACE Kansas City District, gave an overview of the project and described the process that will be utilized in a future virtual working session, with participants like you, that will take place in late November or early December (date/time to be announced). The goal of the project is to collect best practices about technical processes, team dynamics, and logistical or coordination tools that have helped teams and that can help all of us improve our work in risk management. | Chandler, Joe; Rast, Brian | Interagency Coordination, Technical Assistance, Teams in the Workplace, Logistics, Cooperation, Risk Management, Mitigation | Presentation, Recording and Transcript |
| 10/18/2023 | U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) and Post-Disaster Recovery Program | This presentation provided an overview of the USDA Forest Service’s Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) program and methods, which plays a key role in understanding how the landscape and flood risk changes after fire. It also introduced the USDA Forest Service’s new national Post-Disaster Recovery Program. | Sponaugle, Cara; Kohrman, Elaine | Disaster Relief, Fire Risk Assessment, Emergency Management, Rehabilitation | Presentations, Recording and Transcript; ON FIRE: The Report of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission |
| 9/20/2023 | Prelude to the 2024 National Flood Risk Management and Silver Jackets Workshop | This presentation featured three state partners explaining the value of this national workshop. This three-day workshop offered state representatives in flood risk management the opportunity to meet other state and federal flood risk management partners and exchange knowledge, skills, and tools that have helped improve resilience to floods. Attendees heard about the how these three presenters have benefited from attendance at past workshops. The USACE workshop planning team also provided updates on plans for the 2024 Workshop. Attendees had time to ask questions as well. | Bishop Bunny; Hughes, Tom, Bonard, Nick | Business Presentations, Flood Risk Management, Interagency Coordination | Presentations, Recording and Transcript |
| 8/24/2023 | Kentucky Flooding 2022: A Collaborative Approach to Disaster Response and Recovery | This presentation reflected on Eastern Kentucky Flooding in 2022 and the collaborative efforts of the federal partners in the challenging response and recovery work. | Brummett, Brandon; Shanks, Matt; VanPelt, Alex; Brawner, Geni Jo | Business Presentations, Flooding Disaster Relief, Stream Restoration, Flooding, Kentucky | Presentations, Recording and Transcript |
| 8/23/2023 | Flood Risk Management Life Cycle Webinar Series | In this webinar series, learn more about risk communication and management. | USACE Sacramento District | Flood risk management life cycle, preparedness risk messaging, response, mitigation, recovery | Webinar Playlist |
| 7/10/2023 | U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Natural Resources Conservation Service Program’s (NRCS) Watershed Operation Programs | The Monday, July 10th Silver Jackets webinar featured partners from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Natural Resources Conservation Service Program’s (NRCS) watershed operation programs. The NRCS Watershed Program provides technical and financial assistance to implement conservation practices and works of improvement for soil, water, and land resources within watersheds. The program has three main components: Emergency Watershed Protection; Watershed and Flood Prevention Operations; and Watershed Rehabilitation. | Miller, Alton; Keith, Sonya; Smart, Bronson | Emergency Watershed Programs, Environmental Protection | Presentations, Recording and Transcript |
| 6/22/2023 | Risk Rating 2.0 | This presentation provided an overview of the National Flood Insurance Program Risk Rating 2.0 and its ties to the USACE Levee Safety Program. Time was also spent at the end of the webinar to discuss the 2024 Silver Jackets workshop and collect input on potential topics. | Giron, Gil; Jordan, Bruce | Flood Risk Management, Flood Insurance, Levee Safety, Program, Risk | Presentation, Recording and Transcript |
| 5/23/2023 | Tijuana River Watershed Bi-National Dam Safety Tabletop Exercise (TTX) Overview | The presentation highlighted the challenges and opportunities of bi-national, bi-directional communication during a disaster response event and the special consideration that is needed to foster a collaborative environment. | Zubel, Nick; Lopez, Helen; Whalen, Megan; Moore, Sarah; Rodriguez, Patricia Fontanet | Business Presentations Dam Safety, Communication, Interagency Coordination, Disaster Relief, Response, Workshop, Collaboration | Presentation, Recording and Transcript |