Characterization of Floods in the 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.