Automated Flood Prediction along Railway Tracks Using Remotely Sensed Data and Traditional Flood Models

Ground hazards are a significant problem in the global economy, costing millions of dollars in damage each year. Railroad tracks are vulnerable to ground hazards like flooding since they traverse multiple terrains with complex environmental factors and diverse human developments. Traditionally, flood-hazard assessments are generated using models like the Hydrological Engineering Center–River Analysis System (HEC-RAS). However, these maps are typically created for design flood events (10, 50, 100, 500 years) and are not available for any specific storm event, as they are not designed for individual flood predictions. Remotely sensed methods, on the other hand, offer precise flood extents only during the flooding, which means the actual flood extents cannot be determined beforehand. Railroad agencies need daily flood extent maps before rainfall events to manage and plan for the parts of the railroad network that will be impacted during each rainfall event. A new approach would involve using traditional flood-modeling layers and remotely sensed flood model outputs such as flood maps created using the Google Earth Engine. These new approaches will use machine-learning tools in flood prediction and extent mapping. This new approach will allow for determining the extent of flood for each rainfall event on a daily basis using rainfall forecast; therefore, flooding extents will be modeled before the actual flood, allowing railroad managers to plan for flood events pre-emptively. Two approaches were used: support vector machines and deep neural networks. Both methods were fine-tuned using grid-search cross-validation; the deep neural network model was chosen as the best model since it was computationally less expensive in training the model and had fewer type II errors or false negatives, which were the priorities for the flood modeling and would be suitable for developing the automated system for the entire railway corridor. The best deep neural network was then deployed and used to assess the extent of flooding for two floods in 2020 and 2022. The results indicate that the model accurately approximates the actual flooding extent and can predict flooding on a daily temporal basis using rainfall forecasts.