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FLOOD FORECASTING
FLOOD FORECASTING
A Global Perspective
Edited by
THOMAS C. PAGANO
Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Australia
Notices
Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research
and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional
practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge
in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described
herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own
safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional
responsibility.
To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or
editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a
matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any
methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.
To our parents, Anne, Jess, Megan, Mary, Thomas, Soroosh Sorooshian, Phil
Pasteris, Rob Vertessy, Florian Pappenberger, Andy Wood, Maria-Helena
Ramos, Tanya Smith, and the global community of operational flood
forecasters.
CONTRIBUTORS
xiii
xiv Contributors
A. Givati
Israeli Hydrological Service, Jerusalem, Israel
T. Harrison
Flood Incident Management, Environment Agency, Solihull, United Kingdom
R.R. Holmes Jr.
U.S. Geological Survey, Rolla, MO, United States
A. How
Flood and Operational Risk Management, Natural Resources Wales, Cardiff, United
Kingdom
S. Islam
Tufts University, Medford, MA, United States
Y. Jiang
Tufts University, Medford, MA, United States
P. Kabuya
University of Kinshasa; CB-HYDRONET, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
M. Kalas
European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy
G. Kibukusa
Ministère des Affaires Sociales, Actions Humanitaires et Solidarité Nationale, Kinshasa,
Democratic Republic of Congo
B. Krzeminski
European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy
Z. Liu
Hydrological Forecast Center, The Ministry of Water Resources of China, Beijing, China
J.C. Loaiza
IDEAM, Bogotá, Colombia
V. Lukanda
University of Kinshasa, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
G. Mahe
Laboratoire HydroScience, IRD, Montpellier, France
Y. Mohammed
Hydraulic Research Station (HRS), Wad Madani, Sudan
D. Muraro
European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy
T.C. Pagano
Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Australia
R.C.D. Paiva
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil
W. Palash
Tufts University, Medford, MA, United States
Contributors xv
F. Pappenberger
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, United Kingdom
J.K. Perkins
Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
C. Pilling
Flood Forecasting Centre, Met Office, Exeter, United Kingdom
D. Price
Flood Forecasting Centre, Met Office, Exeter, United Kingdom
S. Rademacher
German Federal Institute of Hydrology, Koblenz, Germany
M.C. Rosero Mesa
IDEAM, Bogotá, Colombia
P. Salamon
European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy
M.C. Sandoval
CVC, Cali, Colombia
B.R. Sharma
International Water Management Institute (IWMI), New Delhi, India
M. Silver
Ben Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel
Y. Simonov
Hydrometeorological Research Centre of Russian Federation, Moscow, Russia
V. Smakhtin
International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Colombo, Sri Lanka
D.L. Small
Tufts University, Medford, MA, United States
P.J. Smith
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, United Kingdom
J. Thielen del Pozo
European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy
R.M. Tshimanga
University of Kinshasa; CB-HYDRONET, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
J.M. Tshitenge
University of Kinshasa; CB-HYDRONET, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
M. Werner
UNESCO-IHE, Delft, Netherlands; Deltares, Delft, the Netherlands
F. Wetterhall
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, United Kingdom
G.J. Wiche
U.S. Geological Survey, Bismarck, ND, United States
FOREWORD
Why read this book? This book is about the development and implemen-
tation of operational systems for predicting future flood events in an effort
to reduce flood damages and to enable flood risk management at regional
and national scales. Flood forecasting methods and systems generally exploit
the most current developments in meteorology, hydrology, remote sensing,
computer science, and decision analysis, as well as risk communication and
management. Such systems literally define the current state of knowledge
in those fields because they tend to employ the most sophisticated state-of-
the-art advances for the grand societal purpose of flood risk management.
As two professors who are often charged with introducing and motivat-
ing future scientists and engineers to embark on careers in hydrology and
hydrometeorology, we often use existing flood forecasting systems to de-
scribe the state of the art of our profession because they include climatic
and weather forecasts, rainfall-runoff hydrologic watershed models, reser-
voir systems models, river hydraulic models, along with very sophisticated
graphical user interfaces.Thus such systems integrate most of the topics and
developments in the fields of hydrology and hydrometeorology.What better
way to introduce and impress students about the extraordinary sophistica-
tion and societal value of our field to encourage future careers in this area?
This is not a book about the theory of flood forecasting; rather, it is
about actual flood forecasting systems written and edited by two authors
who have spent their entire careers creating such systems in the United
States and Australia. This book provides a comprehensive review of devel-
opments in flood forecasting and flood risk management using experience
written by experts of systems in the United States, China, Russia, Britain,
Israel, Germany, Europe, Brazil, Australia, Congo, and the Sudan. It focuses
on national and regional flood forecasting systems, which tend to be the
most sophisticated among existing flood forecasting systems, though there
are exceptions, and there are also a myriad of small flood forecasting systems,
globally.
Flood forecasting systems can be developed over a wide range of tem-
poral scales ranging from hours to days, or even months, depending on the
spatial scale of interest and/or the availability of reliable weather forecasts.
Rather than providing an overview of this book, which is given in the next
introductory section, we use this foreword to emphasize a few aspects of
xvii
xviii Foreword
flood forecasting, not commonly discussed, which could benefit from fur-
ther research and development:
Future advances in flood forecasting and water management: The skill asso-
ciated with weather forecasts has improved considerably over the last 3
decades. Improvements in weather forecasts, combined with advances in
monitoring, remote sensing, data collection, and models, have led to con-
current improvements in our flood forecasting skill. Unfortunately, many
reservoirs are still operated using fixed “rule curves” designed decades ago.
Similarly, for most existing reservoirs, flood control storage requirements
were determined from a long-range frequency analysis of n-day flood vol-
umes. As a result, many existing reservoirs have never experienced spills!
For such systems, and many others, there is vast potential for developing
dynamic rule curves that provide dynamic changes in flood control stor-
age, while concurrently allocating the additional water for the benefit of
society, including human and ecological requirements, all conditioned on
flood forecasts. Thus a basic and open research question involves an assess-
ment of methods for exploiting improvements in flood forecasting skill for
altering the flood control space allocation without increasing the current
downstream flood risk, yet leading to concurrent improvements in human
and ecological flow needs. What we suggest is a shift in flood control op-
erations and management practices that effectively blends improvements in
flood forecasts with operational guidelines for flood control systems. Such a
shift may become increasingly important as society attempts to account for
increasing concerns over nonstationary hydrologic behavior resulting from
climate change, urbanization, and other anthropogenic influences on flood
control systems.
Seamless integration of streamflow forecasts over multiple time scales: Short-
term flood forecasting is useful if the flood event exceeds a critical thresh-
old, particularly during tropical storms and hurricanes. Such forecasts are
particularly useful for issuing flash flood warnings for watersheds with little
or no flood storage. However, for watersheds with considerable flood stor-
age capacity, such forecasts are of limited value because existing flood stor-
age will tend to dampen flood impacts. For systems with significant flood
storage capacity, longer-term streamflow forecasts at monthly to seasonal
time scales may be more useful. Thus, what is really needed are continuous
streamflow forecasting systems which span seamlessly from short-term me-
teorological to longer-term climate time scales.
Flood forecasts for run-of-the-river hydropower and other water resource sys-
tems: Currently, operational flood forecasts tend to target large watersheds.
Foreword xix
Richard M. Vogel
Professor, Tufts University.
Email: Richard.Vogel@tufts.edu.
Sankarasubramanian Arumugam
Professor, North Carolina State University.
Email: sankar_arumugam@ncsu.edu.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We want to thank the staff at Elsevier for their help, patience, and guidance
through the process of getting this book completed, particularly Rowena
Prasad. We are, of course, extremely appreciative of the work and dedica-
tion of our colleagues who have contributed to the book chapters. After all,
it is their individual contributions that cause this book to have any value.
We would all be remiss for not acknowledging the contributions of all the
engineers and scientists developing the flood forecasting systems that aim
at the protection of lives and property of those we serve.
xxi
Flood Forecasting:
A Global Perspective
T.E. Adams III*, T.C. Pagano†
*University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States
†
Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Australia
1 INTRODUCTION
Throughout history, civilizations have had to cope with the consequences
of flooding. Accounts of flooding and their impacts along the Nile River in
Egypt and in Mesopotamia from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers have been
documented by ancient Greek philosophers (Kirk, Raven, & Schofield,
2013). Passages in Homeric poems and writings by Herodotus (484–25 BCE)
postulated the existence of Okeanos, a river surrounding the Earth, as the
source of all waters and, by extension, tried to understand and explain flood-
ing. Thales (624–546 BCE) proposed that flooding of the Nile was caused
by the Etesian winds (strong, dry north winds originating over the Aegean
Sea from about mid-May to mid-September), which prevented the river
from discharging out to the Mediterranean Sea. Similar ancient accounts of
great floods and their causes can be found in other cultures and civilizations.
The underlying themes are the occasional devastating effects that flooding
has on human populations and the ongoing need to understand and predict
the occurrence of floods. To that end, nothing has changed since ancient
times.
Flooding is a serious and expensive issue. In 2013, flooding was re-
sponsible for nearly half of all natural catastrophe-related losses (Swiss Re,
2013a). The 2011 Thailand flood caused US$48 billion in losses and left 5
million people homeless (Swiss Re, 2013b). Climate change may increase
the intensity of floods in some regions (Hirabayashi et al., 2013). Flood
forecasting and warning systems have been shown to reduce impacts and
save lives, and these systems are an increasingly important tool for water
managers and emergency response services.
xxiii
xxiv Introduction
Laura Thornborough
Wiley Oakley, his wife, and children gather on the
porch of their Scratch Britches home at Cherokee
Orchard with “Minnehaha.” Oakley always said, “I
have two women: one I talk to and one who talks to
me.”
National Park Service
Oakley was a park guide before there was a park. And
in that role he nearly always wore a red plaid shirt. He
developed friendships with Henry Ford and John D.
Rockefeller and became known as the “Will Rogers of
the Smokies.”
In Horace Kephart’s own eyes, his greatest education came from the
spirited breed of mountain man known as “blockade runners” or
simply “blockaders.” These descendants of hard-drinking Scotsmen
and Irishmen had always liked to “still” a little corn whisky to drink
and, on occasion, to sell. But as the 1920s opened into the era of
Prohibition, the mountain distiller of a now contraband product
reached his heyday. He found and began to supply an expanding,
and increasingly thirsty market.
Stealth became the keynote in this flourishing industry. Mountaineers
searched out laurel-strangled hollows and streams that seemed
remote even to their keen eyes. There they assembled the copper
stills into which they poured a fermented concoction of cornmeal,
rye, and yeast known as “sour mash” or “beer.” By twice heating the
beer and condensing its vapors through a water-cooled “worm” or
spiral tube, they could approximate the uncolored liquor enjoyed at
the finest New York parties. And by defending themselves with
shotguns rather than with words, they could continue their
approximations.
In this uniquely romantic business, colorful characters abounded on
both sides of the law. Horace Kephart wrote about a particular pair of
men who represented the two legal extremes: the famous
moonshiner Aquilla Rose, and the equally resilient revenuer from the
Internal Revenue Service, W. W. Thomason.
Aquilla, or “Quill,” Rose lived for 25 years at the head of sparsely
populated Eagle Creek. After killing a man in self-defense and hiding
out in Texas awhile, Rose returned to the Smokies with his wife and
settled so far up Eagle Creek that he crowded the Tennessee-North
Carolina state line. Quill made whisky by the barrel and seemed to
drink it the same way, although he was occasionally seen playing his
fiddle or sitting on the porch with his long beard flowing and his
Winchester resting across his lap. His eleventh Commandment, to
“never get ketched,” was faithfully observed, and Quill Rose
remained one of the few mountain blockaders to successfully
combine a peaceable existence at home with a dangerous livelihood
up the creek.
W.W. Thomason visited Horace Kephart at Bryson City in 1919.
Kephart accepted this “sturdy, dark-eyed stranger” as simply a tourist
interested in the moonshining art. While Thomason professed
innocence, his real purpose in the Smokies was to destroy stills
which settlers were operating on Cherokee lands to evade the local
law. He prepared for the job by taking three days to carve and paint
a lifelike rattlesnake onto a thick sourwood club. During the following
weeks, he would startle many a moonshiner by thrusting the stick
close and twisting it closer.
When Kephart led the “Snake-Stick Man” into whiskyed coves in the
Sugarlands or above the Cherokee reservation, he found himself
deputized and a participant in the ensuing encounters. More often
than not, shots rang out above the secluded thickets. In one of these
shootouts, Thomason’s hatband, solidly woven out of hundreds of
strands of horsehair, saved this fearless revenuer’s life.