FloodNet's mission is to develop tools for real-time urban flood monitoring, implement these tools to measure flooding in New York City, and make flood data and monitoring tools available in a manner that is accessible and useful to stakeholders including residents, community-based organizations, government agencies, and researchers.
The FloodNet team is composed of researchers and practitioners at New York University, the City University of New York, and New York City government agencies working in collaboration with stakeholders to collect and share data that contribute toward flood risk mitigation and building community flood resilience. FloodNet is deploying 500 realtime flood depth sensors at flood prone locations across NYC's five boroughs. The flood sensors are typically mounted to street signposts, measuring water levels directly beneath. As of March 2025, we have installed over 250 sensors and collected flood data for over 2100 flood events.
In this demonstration we will introduce the project and walk through our soon to be released dataset on the NYC Open Data platform. The dataset consists of flood events captured by our sensor network over its 4+ years of operation and includes: start/end times, peak depth, time-series depth measurements and associated sensor metadata. We will also present how the data has been used to verify a hydrological model of the Midland Beach neighborhood of Staten Island adjacent to the New Creek Bluebelt flood mitigation development.
To find out more about the FloodNet project, please visit our website at:
floodnet.nyc
