Flash floods occur periodically in Makkah city, Saudi Arabia, due to several factors including its rugged topography and geological structures. Hence, precise assessment of floods becomes a more vital demand in development planning. A GIS-based methodology has been developed for quantifying and spatially mapping the flood characteristics. The core of this new approach is integrating several top...

1. introduction current statistical methods may be unable to accurately predict recurrence intervals of rare, large magnitude floods. the usual procedure involves extrapolation from gauged hydrological records documenting 30–40 year records of observed (normally small) floods to the estimation of the quantifies and recurrence intervals of very large, rare floods. this conventional approaches be...

The City of Houston has been facing flood problems of a serious nature, some of which occurred in 1989, 1992, 1994, 1998, 2001, and 2003. Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001 created the most extensive urban flood damage in U.S. history ($5 billion). Urban flood problems have repeatedly brought attention to the need for improved urban drainage design and flood prediction, as in the case of the T...

Early flood warning systems protect both infrastructure and human life by issuing accurate flood warnings to public and private entities, enabling emergency personnel to employ strategic procedures. One such system, the RiceU/TMC Flood Alert System (FAS) has proved effective at predicting flood levels along Brays Bayou for 30 major storm events since 1997, including T.S. Allison in 2001. The cu...

Floodplains are composed of aquatic and terrestrial habitats that are frequently reshaped by hydrologic processes operating at various spatial and temporal scales. I hypothesized that floodplain habitat complexity is maximized at intermediate discharges because small changes in flow result in substantial aquatic habitat changes and extreme discharges are associated with a decreased habitat hete...