Characterization of Floods in the United States

Manabendra Saharia, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Research and Applications Laboratory, Boulder, CO, United States, Pierre-Emmanuel Kirstetter, University of Oklahoma, School of Meteorology and School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Norman, United States, Jonathan J Gourley, NOAA/OAR National Severe Storms Laboratory, Oklahoma City, United States, Yang Hong, University of Oklahoma, School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Norman, United States and Humberto J Vergara, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States
Abstract:
Floods, especially flash floods, have attracted significant attention in the recent past, due to their devastating nature and potential for causing significant economic damage and loss of life. In the United States, flood characterization studies have only been done on a case study basis. The lack of a comprehensive database matching flood characteristics such as peak discharges and flood duration with geospatial and geomorphologic information hampered systematic exploration. This study examines flooding characteristics across the continental United States in order to identify how space and time scales of floods vary with climatic regimes and geomorphology. Benefiting from the availability of a representative and long archive of flood events, this work results in a spatially and temporally comprehensive flood characterization over the US.

We characterized flooding events by linking flood response variables such as unit peak discharge and flooding rise time with morphologic parameters such as basin area, relief ratio and elongation ratio. This study also establishes new regression equations taking advantage of the long historical record of floods in US at our disposal per the publicly available flooding database.

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