Evaluation of the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog for management and discovery of FAIR flood hazard models

Abstract

Approaches for performing flood hazards modeling and risk assessment at federal, state, and local agencies are undergoing emergent challenge for consistent metadata and cataloging systems to ensure the sharing of flood risk data in a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) manner. This paper explores the suitability of a suite of software and specifications developed by the Earth observation community for environmental modeling, which adhere to the FAIR principles not only for managing published or authoritative data but throughout the model development and flood hazard analysis phases. Specifically, we evaluate the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) in a pilot study undertaken as part of the Future of Flood Risk Data (FFRD) initiative of FEMA. The experimental results indicate the STAC ecosystem offers a flexible cloud native approach for linking data, managing metadata, and cataloging collections of models. Further, the STAC framework shows favorable results in a probabilistic and other use cases.