Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas on August 25 as a category 4 hurricane with wind gusts exceeding 150 miles per hour. As Harvey moved inland the forward motion of the storm slowed down and produced tremendous rainfall amounts to southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana. Historic flooding occurred in Texas and Louisiana as a result of the widespread, heavy rainfall over an 8-day period in Louisiana in August and September 2017. Following the storm event, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hydrographers recovered and documented 2,123 high-water marks in Texas, noting location and height of the water above land surface. Many of these high-water marks were used to create flood-inundation maps for selected communities of Texas that experienced flooding in August and September, 2017.
Nineteen flood-inundation maps in 11 river and coastal basins were created by using GIS for areas near rivers that flooded as a result of Harvey in southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana. The study area consists of the Brazos, Neches, Pine Island Bayou, Sabine, San Bernard, and San Jacinto River Basins along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, also including six smaller coastal basins that drain directly to the Gulf of Mexico, and coastal areas from Port Aransas to Matagorda Bay. The HWM elevation data from the USGS Short-tern Network (STN) was used to create the flood water-surface raster file (U.S. Geological Survey [USGS], 2018, Short-Term Network Data Portal: USGS flood information web page, accessed February 13, 2018, at https://water.usgs.gov/floods/FEV.). The water-surface raster was the basis for the creation of the final flood inundation polygon and depth layer to support the development of flood inundation map for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) response and recovery operations.