Project Summary: Levees are critical infrastructural elements for flood protection that are built with earth materials. They run parallel to rivers and coastlines and are designed to keep water out of the low-lying communities and agricultural lands behind the levee. America’s over 100,000 miles of levees were built with varying levels of quality using a wide variety of materials that are often dictated by availability rather than engineering specifications and these aging levees are being exposed to increasing stress due to climate change. Moreover, the construction of levees presents the so-called levee paradox, in which the presence of the levee system lowers public perception of risk in protected areas, thereby reducing incentives to take auxiliary precautions and leading to reduced preparedness. This Leading Engineering for America's Prosperity, Health, and Infrastructure (LEAP-HI) research will enable riverside communities to better analyze their options and resources for flood defense and plan for a projected increase in the frequency of extreme weather events. The project will expand our understanding of how infrastructure responds and fails during natural hazards. It will include collaborations between universities (including a Historically Black University), government agencies, and society. Finally, the project will contribute to U.S. workforce development through training a diverse group of students on the development and deployment of cutting-edge technology for the assessment of flood and environmental hazards.

This project will address uncertainties in levee performance and levee breach flooding through a convergent approach that integrates smart sensing of geotechnical and hydraulic parameters with probabilistic and deterministic modeling of levee failure and inundation of levee-protected floodplains. The project will investigate an integrated levee monitoring and flood risk assessment system consisting of unmanned aerial vehicle-assisted deployment of novel sensors, automated data collection, and coupled data-driven, probabilistic, and physics-based models. These high fidelity spatial and temporal measurement and modeling capabilities will be leveraged by domain expertise in the fields of hydrology and hydraulics, structural reliability, and geotechnical engineering to create fragility metrics for levee reliability that will be integrated into a system of models for the flood disaster chain. The system will allow decision-makers and stakeholders to monitor and repair vulnerable levees, develop countermeasures, and support a risk-based decision-making process aimed at developing effective risk communication and flood management policy. This project will expand the understanding of floodplain hydrology as well as the dynamic interactions of soil parameters and hydraulic loading. Given the potential for the project’s data, sensor designs, and modeling tools to benefit the public good, the project’s artifacts will be open-sourced and made freely available to enable other researchers and practitioners to leverage the project’s advancements.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.