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.
The mapped area boundary, flood inundation extents, and depth rasters were created to provide an estimated extent of flood inundation along the Neches River within counties of Orange, Jasper, Hardin, Jefferson, and Tyler, including the communities of Beaumont, Evadale, Port Neches, and Central Gardens, Texas. The mapped area of the Neches Basin was separated into two sections due to the availability and location of high-water marks. The upper reach of the Neches River extends from near the confluence with the Angelina River to the confluence of Black Creek in the Big Thicket National Preserve. The lower reach of the Neches River extends from the confluence of Black Creek in the Big Thicket National Preserve to Sabine Lake. These geospatial data include the following items: 1. bnd_neches_upper and bnd_neches_lower; shapefiles containing the polygon showing the mapped area boundary for the upper and lower Neches River flood maps, 2. hwm_neches_upper and hwm_neches_lower; shapefiles containing high-water mark points used for inundation maps, 3. polygon_neches_upper and polygon_neches_lower; shapefiles containing mapped extent of flood inundation for the upper and lower mapped sections of the Neches River, derived from the water-surface elevation surveyed at high-water marks, and 4. depth_upper and depth_lower; raster files for the flood depths derived from the water-surface elevation surveyed at high-water marks. The upstream and downstream mapped area extent is limited to the upstream-most and downstream-most high-water mark locations. In areas of uncertainty of flood extent, the mapped area boundary is lined up with the flood inundation polygon extent. The mapped area boundary polygon was used to extract the final flood inundation polygon and depth raster from the water-surface elevation raster file. Depth raster files were created using the "Topo to Raster" tool in ArcMap (ESRI, 2012). These data show the area of inundation within communities along the Neches River, Texas. 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.