A multi-source 120-year US flood database with a unified common format and public access

Abstract

Abstract. Despite several flood databases available in the United States, there is a benefit to combine and reconcile these diverse data sources into a comprehensive flood database with a unified common format and easy public access in order to facilitate flood-related research and applications. Typically, floods are reported by specialists or media according to their socioeconomic impacts. Recently, data-driven analysis can reconstruct flood events based on in situ and/or remote-sensing data. Lately, with the increasing engagement of citizen scientists, there is the potential to enhance flood reporting in near-real time. The central objective of this study is to integrate information from seven popular multi-sourced flood databases into a comprehensive flood database in the United States, made readily available to the public in a common data format. Natural language processing, geocoding, and harmonizing processing steps are undertaken to facilitate such development. In total, there are 698 507 flood records in the United States from 1900 to the present, which highlights the longest and most comprehensive recording of flooding across the country. The database features event locations, durations, date/times, socioeconomic impacts (e.g., fatalities and economic damages), and geographic information (e.g., elevation, slope, contributing area, and land cover types retrieved from ancillary data for given flood locations). Finally, this study utilizes the flood database to analyze flood seasonality within major basins and socioeconomic impacts over time. It is anticipated that thus far the most comprehensive yet unified database can support a variety of flood-related research, such as a validation resource for hydrologic or hydraulic simulations, hydroclimatic studies concerning spatiotemporal patterns of floods, and flood susceptibility analysis for vulnerable geophysical locations. The dataset is publicly available with the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4547036 (Li, 2020).

Spatiotemporal Characteristics of US Floods: Current Status and Forecast Under a Future Warmer Climate

“…Weather types in the central US are composed of spring‐summer MCSs (Ashley et al., 2003; Prein et al., 2017), summer‐fall tropical cyclones (Chalise et al., 2021; Li, Chen, Gao, Gourley, et al., 2021), and spring extratropical cyclones (Barbero et al., 2019), among which extreme rainfall events in summer are the most prevalent (Figure 7a). Flood events in late spring are common in the northern plains (Figure 9a), mainly caused by the contribution from snowmelt and rain‐on‐snow events (Brunner et al., 2020; Villarini, 2016).…”

“…Moreover, they are recognized as attributes to generalize flood‐generating mechanisms (Brunner et al., 2020; Li, Chen, Gao, Gourley, et al., 2021; Merz et al., 2021; Smith et al., 2011; Stein et al., 2021; Villarini, 2016). A body of studies has successfully described US flood spatial dependence and seasonality based on historical observations (Brunner et al., 2020; Li, Chen, Gao, Gourley, et al., 2021; Stein et al., 2021; Villarini, 2016). Villarini (2016) completed a comprehensive study on US streamflow seasonality, in which he did not observe strong temporal shifts in flood seasonality, but seasonality strength is weakening due to human interference.…”

Structural Hillslope Connectivity Is Driven by Tectonics More Than Climate and Modulates Hydrologic Extremes and Benefits

“…In total, 3,502 CONUS landslide events were recorded in the catalog, occurring between 1996 and 2017. The Dartmouth Flood Observatory (DFO) database was used to retrieve the location of significant river‐flooding events, which are compiled from news, government agencies, stream gages, and remote sensing (Li et al., 2021; Tellman et al., 2021). In total, from 1985 to 2020, 424 CONUS river‐flooding events were documented in the database.…”

“…All data and code generated in this study are available in the Supporting Information S1 or at CUAHSI Hydro-Share: https://doi.org/10.4211/hs.e80005f70e974e729db02b25945ded8d. The earthquake, landslide, and flood data generated by other researchers and used in this study are available in Pagani et al (2020), Kirschbaum et al (2010), andLi et al (2021), respectively.…”

CREST-VEC: A framework towards more accurate and realistic flood simulation across scales

“…Flooding all over the world has affected millions of people, especially those who reside in floodplains (Li et al, 2021a; Tellman et al, 2021). In the US, flooding, as the primary cause for billion-dollar weather disasters, costs $3.9 billion monetary losses and 15 deaths per year over the past four decades according to the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters (2021).…”