Notice of Intent to Sole Source - HEC-FDA V2.0 External Peer Review - Hydrologic Uncertainty, Bulletin 17C Consistency

This is a Special Notice prepared in accordance with Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) subpart 5.2, Synopsis of Proposed Contract Actions. A Solicitation will not be posted, however any firm who believes it can perform the required services may give written notice to the Contracting Officer within 15 days of publication of this Special Notice. Supporting evidence must be in sufficient detail to demonstrate the ability to comply with the requirement. Responses received will be evaluated; however a determination by the Government to compete the requirement based on the responses to this Special Notice is solely the discretion of the Government. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Humphreys Engineer Center Support Activity (HECSA) intends to award a sole source fixed-price contract to Jery Stedinger for services entitled "HEC-FDA V2.0 External Peer Review - Hydrologic Uncertainty, Bulletin 17C Consistency". Version 2 of the Hydrologic Engineering Center Flood Damage Reduction Analysis Software (HEC-FDA) is a major update to the currently nationally-certified HEC-FDA v1.4.3. HEC-FDA v2.0 is a new software program and will include an entirely new user interface. The development team at the Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC) has implemented many of the same methods included in the previous version of the HEC-FDA software to estimate expected annual damages, the measure of economic risk from flooding. Some of the newer features like the geospatial computation of economic consequences will be reviewed internally as part of the model certification effort. A significant change in HEC-FDA v2.0 is the way that the software samples hydrologic uncertainty. This updated method is consistent with the - Guidelines for Determining Flood Flow Frequency Bulletin 17C in that this method reflects the marginal uncertainty about the flow-frequency relationship due to uncertainty in skew. To make more tools available to project delivery teams, the Flood Risk Management Planning Center of Expertise (FRM-PCX) is leading an effort to review and certify the latest version of HEC-FDA. As part of this effort, due to the significance of the methodological difference in sampling hydrologic uncertainty, the FRM-PCX seeks an external peer review of the new hydrologic sampling method that has been implemented in HEC-FDA v2.0. Dr. Jery Stedinger is a professor of Civil Engineering at Cornell University. His research and contributions to the field of water resource engineering have included statistical issues in hydrology. His research has made advances incorporating information about historical flooding and paleofloods, and in improving risk and uncertainty analysis of flood-risk reduction projects. The efforts to address the value of historic floods and risk and uncertainty in flood risk projects uniquely position him to support this review of HEC-FDA 2.0 and the parametric bootstrapping approach it uses to characterize uncertainty about the flow-frequency relationship. Dr. Stedinger has previously supported USACE and HEC by reviewing the implementation of uncertainty in graphical flood frequency curves in the HEC-FDA 1.4 version series. There are no other available technical experts with the combined experience of having expertise in statistical hydrology and understanding of the HEC-FDA software program. The focus of the review is explicit and specific. Dr. Stedinger's experience with USACE, expertise and the timeline for the review place Dr. Stedinger in the position of being the only person that can meet USACE's needs for this particular review. No competition is being sought