It's been two years since eastern Kentucky was devastated by historic flooding that killed 45 people and left thousands displaced.

Researchers at the University of Kentucky home to hope to gain a better understanding of why these disasters are happening in Appalachia and help the region predict and prepare for flash flooding.

So we've been collecting precipitation and stream stream water or stream flow and water quality data for over 40 years.

So we've got this really great long term record of incoming rainfall, outgoing stream flow in both small headwater streams as well as the larger streams that that they flow into when a central goal is to better understand how flash floods happen and this particular region, certainly in light of the 2022 floods in eastern Kentucky, but also with, you know, the much more recent floods as a result of flooding in Tennessee and North Carolina.

So first, kind of understand scientifically what's going on in our hydrological, what's going to develop these floods and figure out how to better predict when that kind of flood might happen based on existing environmental conditions and incoming rainfall.

Yeah, a lot of the environmental data that we'll be working with to build the models like to predict flooding will be using data from Robinson Forest.

Robinson Forest as you case research forest and it's located and breath it peri and not counties in eastern Kentucky that are there at Robinson Forest.

We have basically a monitoring network that collects data on stream flow precipitation and air temperature.

Then we develop systems or technologies or approaches to help give warning that we know that there's a risk of a flood.

You know, given given those conditions.

And so we won't stop at publishing our peer reviewed journal articles.

That'll be a great product that'll be really helpful for improving scientific understanding of small headwater streams and how they contribute to flash flooding, especially in mountainous regions.

All of that kind of stuff is going to be really important to science, but our communication will end there and it will be an ongoing conversation with local community members that know members of our team and have worked with them, I think will really benefit from those relationships because we'll be able to enter into a conversation with community members about what we think our results mean and we'll be able to hear from community members what they're actually concerned about.

I think there's there's a lot of opportunity for us to learn what might be what might be hindrances to folks getting prepared for this flooding.

We see people don't want to leave their homes when floods are forecast.

So we want to gain a better understanding of of of the hindrances that people face from our side.

And then at the same time communicate with folks about what we're learning and the steps that we've taken to do to reach our results and communicate those results in the most informative way possible.

I'm thankful that we're not just kind of going to be scientists and doing these things in a way that's disconnected from the community members that we're really hoping to support and another way the researchers plan to work with the community is by helping high school and middle school teachers develop science based programing and offering field day experiences to students.

They say students will be able to plant trees at former surface mine sites and learn how reestablishing forests on those sites can help mitigate flooding.