Regional planners present statewide tool to project extreme rainfall; Volusia staff told to treat outputs as planning input, not regulatory replacement

John Guadiolo, GIS director for the Central Florida Regional Planning Council, told Volusia County's Environmental and Natural Resources Advisory Committee on Feb. 5 that his office has built a planning tool to project future extreme rainfall and map flood exposure across counties in East-Central Florida.

Guadiolo said the project, funded through a $1,500,000 regional grant awarded in 2022, models a 24-hour, 100-year storm and projects how that design storm may change at two planning horizons (roughly 2040 and 2070). The work combines statewide rainfall rasters, lidar elevation, soils and land-cover inputs and locally calibrated change factors to produce flood-depth and exposure outputs for planners. "This is a planning tool... to put more resources where it's necessary based on these results," Guadiolo said during the presentation.

The project is intended as a regional planning resource: the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council leads the effort and is working with five other regional councils, university partners, the Florida Division of Emergency Management and local water-management districts.…