(Okoboji)– A hydrologist and Director of the Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa says significant advancements are being made in flood predictions. Dr. Larry Weber was one of the keynote speakers during a seminar Saturday held as part of the Boji Cleanwater Jam. He says 270 flood monitoring sensors have been deployed throughout Iowa since the 2024 floods that devastated northwest Iowa. He says they utilize ultrasound technology…
“Many of those flood center gauges are on what were previously ungauged streams just upstream of small communities or other critical infrastructure in our state that before had no information about the rise and rate of rise of the streams in there area. Now we’re able to monitor that and communicate it. It’s all available publicly through the Iowa Flood Information System. You can select any one of those sensors and get that data whether it’s a USGS gauge or Iowa Flood Center gauge.”
He adds the Iowa Flood Center is working jointly with the National Weather Service on a national flood forecasting system, adding they are in the process now of installing hydrostations throughout Iowa that monitor rainfall intensity, soil moisture and temperature. He says they have been deployed in about 55 counties, mainly in eastern and central Iowa, adding they were recently awarded funding through the 2024 disaster recovery relief funds to install hydrostations in a number of counties in western and northwest Iowa.
Dr. Weber adds that while it was bad enough, the 2024 flooding in northwest Iowa would have been even much worse had it not been for a severe drought that preceded the extremely heavy rain in June of that year…
“So much of that water landed on the Missouri River channel or just adjacent to the Missouri River. And that channel had a lot of carrying capacity because it was at some all time lows. If this system would have been 100 miles to the east or 150 miles to the east and south, and landed in the Des Moines area, we would have been recovering even from a much different disaster, as bad as it was here. And so I caution people that this didn’t happen there for some specific reason. It happened because it happened as rainfall does. And so we’ve got to be mindful of that as a state as we see these droughts and floods move around our state and impact different parts of our state.”
Dr. Weber says the Iowa Flood Center recently hired additional staffing and experts to assist with flash flood forecasting.
A portion of Dr. Weber’s presentation Saturday was focused on water quality and the impacts it’s having on Iowa’s cancer rates. We’ll have more on that in upcoming newscasts.
