JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY WATER RESEARCH & EDUCATION The Great Midwest Flood of 1993 brought the attention of the nation to the challenges it faced in dealing with floods. Over a sixmonth period, the ravages of the flood were shown nightly on television and filled columns in the print media. East–West transportation networks throughout the Midwest were severely disrupted and more than 100,000 peo...

Flood forecasts are essential to issue reliable flood warnings and to initiate flood control measures on time. The accuracy and the lead time of the predictions for head waters primarily depend on the meteorological forecasts. Ensemble forecasts are a means of framing the uncertainty of the potential future development of the hydro-meteorological situation. This contribution presents a flood ma...

The basic principles underlying the most commonly used physically-based models of the rainfall-runoff transformation process are reviewed. A thorough knowledge of these principles is a pre-requisite for flood hazard studies and, thus, this chapter reviews several physically-based methods to determine flood discharges, flow depths, and other flood characteristics. The chapter starts with a thoro...

The evaluation of potential damage of future floods is an essential part of flood management project appraisals. Analysis results reliability is an important issue when comparing flood risk reduction project scenarios. Geographic Information System (GIS) technology plays a crucial role on flood risk analyses. On one hand, the evaluation process requires data on flood hazard and on vulnerability...

The temporal variability of nitrate transport was monitored continuously in a large agricultural catchment, the 1110km(2) Save catchment in south-west France, from January 2007 to June 2009. The overall aim was to analyse the temporal transport of nitrate through hydrological response during flood events in the catchment. Nitrate loads and hysteresis were also analysed and the relationships bet...

In March 2014, Congress passed legislation to halt discounted flood insurance premiums from increasing to full-risk levels. The rate hike was authorized two years earlier by the Biggert-Waters Act to address the National Flood Insurance Program’s structurally induced $24 billion debt. The recent developments highlight the tension between risk-based premium and affordability of flood insurance f...

Flood frequency analysis typically assumes that annual floods arise from a single distribution and are independent. However, there is significant evidence for the existence of persistent climate modes. Timescales associated with climate variability range from inter-annual through to longer, multi-decadal time scales. In the case of the Australian climate, previous studies of the Indian and Paci...

Understanding how people view flash flood risks can help improve risk communication, ultimately improving outcomes. This article analyzes data from 26 mental models interviews about flash floods with members of the public in Boulder, Colorado, to understand their perspectives on flash flood risks and mitigation. The analysis includes a comparison between public and professional perspectives by ...

Recent environmental developments have stimulated an interest in conservation and restoration of the historical Willamette River flood plain, both to protect against flooding and to provide wildlife habitat. In order to best utilize scarce resources, we characterized historical and modern river channel and flood-plain conditions to evaluate changes and help prioritize restoration sites. Using c...

SAR images of river inundation prove to be very relevant for operational flood management. However, common exploitation of satellite images of floods is generally restricted to a flood extent extraction. The usefulness of these images could be significantly improved by providing a hydraulic-coherent 3-dimensional (3D) characterization of floods and by integrating these Remote Sensing-Derived (R...