Workshop on Probabilistic Flood Hazard Assessment

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Offices of Nuclear Regulatory Research, Nuclear Reactor Regulation, and New Reactors in cooperation with Federal agency partners: U.S. Department of Energy; Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; U.S. Bureau of Reclamation; and U.S. Geological Survey organized and conducted a "Workshop on Probabilistic Flood Hazard Assessment (PFHA)" at NRC headquarters auditorium, Rockville, Maryland, January 29 – 31, 2013. This research workshop provided a venue for the sharing of information on probabilistic flood hazard assessments of extreme natural and human-related events (i.e., annual exceedance probabilities much less than 2.0 E-3 per year) among the Federal community. The organizing committee chose the session topics, presenters and panelists.

The workshop objectives were to:

assess, discuss, and inform participants on, the state-of-the-practice for extreme flood assessments within a risk context with the following objectives;
facilitate the sharing of information between both Federal agencies and other interested parties to bridge the current state-of-knowledge between extreme flood assessments and risk assessments of critical infrastructures;
seek ideas and insights on possible ways to develop a PFHA for use in probabilistic risk assessments (PRA);
identify potential components of flood-causing mechanisms that lend themselves to probabilistic analysis and warrant further study (i.e., computer-generated storm events);
establish realistic plans for coordination of PFHA research studies as the follow-up to the workshop observations and insights; and
develop plans for a cooperative research strategy on PFHA for the workshop partners.

The technical focus was to:

understand flood assessment needs of the participating Federal agencies with respect to the evaluation of critical industry infrastructure;
leverage the flood hazard risk assessment studies performed to date to assess the applicability and practicality of using probabilistic approaches for extreme flood hazard assessments within a risk framework;
discuss research or other activities needed to address identified gaps or challenges in the use of PFHA for extreme flood assessments within PRA; and
determine how these PFHA approaches and methods can be best utilized in conjunction with more traditional deterministic approaches.

Workshop on Probabilistic Flood Hazard Assessment

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