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Base Terrain and Bathymetry for the Middle Mississippi River

Metadata Updated: July 6, 2024

Within large-river ecosystems, floodplains serve a variety of important ecological functions. A recent survey of 80 managers of floodplain conservation lands along the Upper and Middle Mississippi and Lower Missouri Rivers in the central United States found that the most critical information needed to improve floodplain management centered on metrics for characterizing depth, extent, frequency, duration, and timing of inundation. These metrics can be delivered to managers efficiently through cloud-based interactive maps. To calculate these metrics, we interpolated an existing one-dimensional HEC-RAS hydraulic model for the Middle Mississippi River, which simulated water surface elevations at cross sections spaced (<1 kilometer) to sufficiently characterize water surface profiles along an approximately 800 kilometer stretch upstream from the confluence with the Mississippi River over an 80-year record at a daily time step. To translate these water surface elevations to inundation depths, we subtracted a merged terrain model consisting of floodplain LIDAR and bathymetric surveys of the river channel. We completed these calculations for an 800 kilometer stretch of the Missouri River, spanning from Rulo, Nebraska to the river's confluence with the Mississippi River. Analyzed areas include the entirety of the Mississippi River floodplain, with the exception of the St. Louis metropolitan area in which analysis was constrained to currently unleveed areas only. This approach resulted in a 29,000+ day time series of inundation depths across the floodplain using grid cells with 30 meter spatial resolution. This dataset presents 14 metrics for each of two scenarios, one using a baseline timeseries of stages from the HEC-RAS simulation and one using a timeseries of stages adjusted to account for removal of existing levees from the floodplain. These metrics are calculated on a per pixel basis and encompass a variety of temporal criteria generally relevant to flora and fauna of interest to floodplain managers, including, for example, the average number of days inundated per year within a growing season. We also include the base elevation layer that we generated to calculate depth of inundation from interpolated water-surface elevations.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date July 6, 2024

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI EDI

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date July 6, 2024
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
@Id http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/35c388fff015d4fe2ac25886126fc111
Identifier USGS:5fe9f8e9d34ea5387ded6a3c
Data Last Modified 20201228
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://datainventory.doi.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 85be002d-fdfa-4f6e-a07c-9c0c8f266219
Harvest Source Id 52bfcc16-6e15-478f-809a-b1bc76f1aeda
Harvest Source Title DOI EDI
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -90.5873,36.9362,-89.1439,39.0008
Publisher Hierarchy White House > U.S. Department of the Interior > U.S. Geological Survey
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 371f2c700dfa5088b09db3b0c90afb1df1bfacd5f32adef1c30a873aaa6f36a9
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -90.5873, 36.9362, -90.5873, 39.0008, -89.1439, 39.0008, -89.1439, 36.9362, -90.5873, 36.9362}

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