Extreme floods and short-term hydroclimatological fluctuations in the hyper-arid Dead Sea region, Israel

Distinctiveness and Diversity of Arid Zone River Systems

“…Despite the pervasive human impacts, however, climate generally has been the primary driver of 'very Late Holocene' river activity, with most activity occurring during long-duration winter flood events or more extreme summer/autumn floods (e.g. Poesen and Hooke, 1997;Maas and Macklin, 2002;Greenbaum, Schwartz and Bergman, 2010). Flood records have been reconstructed from the sedimentary deposits left by such events, such as coarse-grained (cobble and boulder gravel) deposits (e.g.…”

Hydropedology of a mildly‐arid loess covered area, southern Israel

“…The limited runoff in the loess covered areas also contrasts with hydrological data available for the hyper arid Dead Sea area, and the southern part of the rift depression, down to the Red Sea. As indicated earlier, recorded peak flows in these areas, for drainage basins draining ~10 km 2 vary in the range 80–120 m 3 s −1 (Greenbaum et al ., ; Tarolli et al ., ). These figures are significantly higher than those recorded in the Haggedi basin (Figures and ).…”

Confluent flow impacts of flood extremes in the middle Yellow River

“…River banks are frequently breached after heavy rains, leading to catastrophic floods which are regularly responsible for heavy loss of life and economic damage in the area (Cunnane, 1988;Burn, 1990Burn, , 1997Bobee et al, 1996;Jain and Lall, 2000;Jun-Haeng et al, 2001;McKillop and Clague, 2007;Greenbaum et al, 2010;Herget and Meurs, 2010;Kehew et al, 2010). The operation of Sanmenxia Reservoir is regarded as a key contributor to severe silting and backwater refluxing (Qian, 1992;Yu and Lin, 1996;Wang, 2004;He et al, 2006He et al, , 2008.…”

“…Flood frequency analysis has often been used previously in studying the trend of river floods (Beven, 1997;Macdonald and Werritty, 2001;Glaser and Stangl, 2003). Various indices, including skewness coefficient, Monte Carlo experiments distribution functions of normal, threeparameter lognormal, Gumbel, Pearson Type 3, Weibull, Pareto, and uniform, have been introduced to monitor river floods on the basis of the regional flood characteristics (Cunnane, 1988;Burn, 1990Burn, , 1997Bobee et al, 1996;Jain and Lall, 2000;Jun-Haeng et al, 2001;Javelle et al, 2002;Palmer and Raisanen, 2002;Christensen and Christensen, 2003;Mudelsee et al, 2003;Greenbaum et al, 2010;Herget and Meurs, 2010;Naidu et al, 2012). These flood indices are effective in relating flood dynamics to precipitation.…”

“…Flood routing computational schemes are mostly derived from the SainteVenant equations (Daluz, 1983;Cunnane, 1988;Ramamurthy, 1990;Camacho and Lees, 1999;Carrivick, 2006;Elleder, 2010) and other simplified wave models such as the kinematic wave, non-inertia wave, quasi-steady dynamic wave, and gravity wave approximations (Walters et al, 1980;Begin, 1986;Bartholy and Pongr acz, 2007;McKillop and Clague, 2007;Alpert et al, 2008;Elleder, 2010;Greenbaum et al, 2010). The common issues reported in previous studies are that simplified kinematic wave and gravity wave models were unable to account for the downstream backwater effect, and were not suitable for modeling the flood wave propagation in mild-sloped rivers.…”