Have you ever watched the news where the weatherman is battling what appears to be a fierce storm while a woman with a baby stroller casually walks by without any trouble? How do we find the real information that puts the situation in perspective? Sometimes a large event can hit one community but not another. How do we know what got hit worst and where things are OK? What other ways are out there to put a flood in perspective? When working on projects from a federal perspective, we often look at things such as the probability of this type of storm occurring in a given year. We often design things based on keeping things safe up to a certain rare occurrence so tools have been created to look at that. The National Weather Service and River Forecast Centers model the weather coming in and predict how much water get into the rivers. How do these predictions compare to events we have seen recently in the past?
