NEVADA: DRI scientists discover uncertainties in flood risk estimates
Flood frequency analysis is a technique used to estimate flood risk, providing statistics that are critical to infrastructure design, dam safety analysis and flood mapping in flood-prone areas. But the method used to calculate these flood frequencies is due for an update, according to a new study by scientists at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), University of Wisconsin-Madison and Colorado State University. In NSF-supported research published in Geophysical Research Letters, a team led by Guo Yu of DRI examined the most common drivers of historic floods in the Western US and investigated the impact of different flood types on the resulting flood frequencies.
"In practice, the role of different mechanisms has often been ignored in deriving the flood frequencies," said Yu. "We showed that neglecting such information can result in uncertainties in estimated flood frequencies which are critical for infrastructure."
The findings have important implications for estimating flood frequencies into the future, as climate change pushes conditions in snowmelt-dominated watersheds toward increased rainfall.