GREEN STORMWATER MANAGEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE (GSMI) SUITABILITY MAPPING FOR SUSTAINABLE FLOOD MANAGEMENT IN THE STATE OF MISSOURI

Urban flooding has been a significant problem over the past century in the United States, causing growing threats to municipal areas. The changes in land use and climate change trends, both affect the number of floods and scale of damage, resulting in inundation, death, infrastructure destruction, and chaos in society's social and economic trends. For example, in the state of Missouri, since 2010, flooding has caused a substantial financial loss of around three to US$6b and 69 human fatalities. Flooding is now the most frequent and among the most devastating disaster in the state of Missouri. Irrespective of the extensive construction of grey infrastructures, many cities are still vulnerable to surface water flooding, especially during extreme weather events. This study proposes a selection of optimal sites for establishing a Green Stormwater Management Infrastructure (GSMI). Retention ponds, detention ponds, and infiltration basins are three examples of GSMI that help alleviate stormwater runoff and serve as alternative and sustainable approaches to mitigating flood hazards in urban areas. To achieve our goal, we performed a GIS-based, multi-criteria evaluation to identify suitable sites for GSMI, based on the following criteria: 1) Terrain dataset; 2) Impervious layer; 3) land cover and soil type; 4) Distance from the Nearest Road (DNR) and 5) Distance from the Nearest Stream (DNS). The Analytic Hierarchy Process defines the weights of the criteria. The model selects several areas around the state that could be suitable for the new GSMI. Most optimal places are found in the states' northern, southcentral, and southeast regions. Some counties such as Gentry, Ray, Carroll, Howard, Scotland, Clark, Vernon, St. Clair, and New Madrid exhibited high suitability values. A sensitivity analysis was performed by considering the model's responsiveness while adjusting the threshold values of each criterion. However, field ground-truthing is needed for flood vulnerable groups, cultural artifacts protection, flood sensitive area infrastructure protection, flood sensitive area building protection, and environmental justice.