Federally Identified Flood Risk Areas

The Federally Identified Flood Risk Areas (FIFRA) datasets were created using a Canada-wide flood hazard model that incorporates land elevation, past climate data including rainfall, and water level information across Canada. These datasets can be found as flood ratings on Canada's Flood Risk Finder for participating provinces and territories. While FIFRA ratings are more uncertain than site-specific flood hazard information, they are useful for understanding flood hazard across Canada.

On this page

Overview

Given Canada's size, it's challenging to achieve detailed engineered flood mapping coverage across the entire country.

While local and regional flood maps exist, gaps remain in providing all Canadians with consistent and up-to-date flood hazard information. It's important to consider local information where it's available, but the FIFRA datasets can supplement and complement engineering maps and provide valuable information about flood hazard across Canada.

The FIFRA datasets use flood depth and likelihood information to estimate flood hazard ratings of low, moderate, high, or extreme. Ratings consider multiple flood scenarios to communicate potential flood severity. Flood ratings are provided for coastal, rainfall, riverine, and a combination of those flood types, but they do not consider ice jam flooding, debris flooding, tsunamis, groundwater flooding, stormwater backups, or the potential effects of property or community-level structural protections such as home mitigation measures or dikes.

The FIFRA datasets can be used to support:

Methodology and limitations

The FIFRA datasets are a reanalysis of an underlying Canada-wide flood hazard model. As the FIFRA datasets only use information from the model, they may present different information than other flood data sources. The scale of this model makes it useful for understanding flood hazard across Canada. The accuracy of the underlying model was examined through a quality control analysis and results show good alignment with engineering maps of riverine flood hazard. However, results of rainfall-driven, localized flooding are more uncertain.

All flood hazard models, including this Canada-wide flood hazard model, are estimates of potential real-life flood conditions and have uncertainty in their results. This means the FIFRA datasets and other flood maps are not exact representations of what flooding could happen in a specific place. The FIFRA datasets work best when used with other sources, such as:

All areas have the potential for rainfall-driven flooding depending on weather conditions, so site-specific assessments should be used for all decision-making. Use the quality control appendix in the FIFRA user guide to learn more.

The FIFRA datasets cannot be commercialized (e.g. used for insurance) and are subject to change at any time.

Comparing to local flood maps

This model and FIFRA datasets are different from engineered flood maps, also known as local or regulatory-quality flood maps, which:

Where available, local engineered flood maps provide the most reliable information as they contain more location-specific information and are developed using local data.

In contrast, Canada-wide flood hazard models estimate hazard across large regions. These models look at entire countries, but at a coarser resolution. They use less detailed data than engineered flood maps at the local level, and rely on more general assumptions about rivers and land types. Canada-wide flood hazard models are useful for screening high-risk areas, raising public awareness, and helping with emergency planning.

It's important to remember that no flood map, model, or rating can provide all the information needed to ensure flood safety. Flooding can occur in all areas, including those with a low flood rating. Those using the FIFRA datasets ratings should carefully consider that misunderstanding flood hazard can result in the under or overestimation of actual risk levels.

Date modified: