First Street, a leading provider of climate risk financial modeling, has released a major update to the flood risk model that powers our Predictive Flood Mapping analysis and our layer catalog. Below is an overview of this feature and an update on the changes.
Predictive Flood Mapping
The Predictive Flood Mapping enables you to assess detailed flood risk before initiating a hydro study. It is supported by First Street’s industry-leading, physics-based models that have been validated against real-world flood events.
Improved flood modeling accuracy
First Street made extensive updates to this year’s flood modeling methodology, improving the accuracy of flood mapping by adopting the US Army Corps of Engineers' HEC-RAS hydraulics model.
2026 Flood Methodology Updates:
The First Street Global Flood Model (FS-GFM) is the world’s first fully cloud-native version of HEC-RAS 2D, the hydraulic engine from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, regarded as the industry standard by the science, government, and engineering communities. It simulates river (fluvial), rainfall (pluvial), and coastal flooding at high resolution across more than 90% of Earth’s land area, accounting for climate projections through 2100. With this update, the same framework now supports First Street’s U.S. model (FS-GFM-US) at 10m resolution, replacing our previous national model. This enhancement provides flood insights based on a unified global methodology, reinforced by top-tier U.S. data.
Read the Summary of Flood Methodology or refer to the Detailed Flood Methodology for more details. This updated data is now available in the Buildable Area Analysis Predictive Flood hazard setting and in the Predictive Flood layers in the Layer Catalog.
Updated Predictive Flood layers in the Layer Catalog
Check out the Layer Catalog for the latest Predictive Flood layers, including flood risk analysis for 100-year and 500-year return periods for the current climate year as well as 100-year and 50–year flood risk for 30 years in the future (2056).
Updating the previous Predictive Flood Mapping
If you have previously performed the Predictive Flood analysis on a site with the Buildable Area Analysis, follow these steps to re-run the Buildable Area Analysis and view constraints updated to the latest version.
To update your analysis on a previous project:
- Go to the project that you want to update.
- Open the Buildable Area Analysis form from the workflow sidebar.
- Go to the Predictive Flood tab and configure your hazard settings as desired, including maximum flood depth(s) and setback(s).
- Click Run at the bottom of the form to update the analysis.
Understand climate risks: Wildfires, Wind, Hail, Lightning, Heat, Drought
We now have hazard risk data for additional perils – all powered by First Street’s leading models. If you’re interested in learning more, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or email support@pvcase.com.