Precipitation-Frequency Atlas of the United States. Volume 11, Version 2.0. Texas.

Perica, Sanja; Pavlovic, Sandra; Laurent, Michael St.; Trypaluk, Carl; Unruh, Dale; Wilhite, Orlan

doi:10.25923/1ceg-5094

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The greater Houston area has been inundated frequently in recent years, with flood events in 2001, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2019. In 2018, the NOAA released Atlas 14, an updated precipitation-frequency dataset for the U.S. Atlas 14 predictions indicate a 5-and 10-inch (13 and 25 cm) increase in the expected 100-and 500-year 24-h precipitation total over much of Southeast Texas (Perica et al, 2018). For Harris County, these values indicate that the traditional 500-year rainfall event will be closer to a 100-year rainfall event going forward.…”

Section: Harvey Rainfallmentioning

confidence: 99%

Upstream Addicks–Barker reservoir damages during Hurricane Harvey: A case study of urban hydrology and policy failure in Houston, TX

Furrh

Bedient

2023

J American Water Resour Assoc

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Addicks and Barker reservoirs were built in the 1940s to protect downtown Houston from flooding and have generally worked very well until 2017 when Hurricane Harvey devastated much of Houston and surroundings with up to 40 inches (102 cm) of rainfall causing flooding of 154,000 homes in over 22 watersheds in Houston/Harris County alone. However, the story of how Addicks and Barker flooded upstream residential areas from a hydrologic standpoint is a harsh lesson in flood infrastructure policy and funding. This failure to protect both downstream properties in Buffalo Bayou and upstream areas behind the dams ended up with tens of thousands of flooded homes and properties, with many having flood waters for over 10 days. This paper explores the main causes for the flooding and addresses the hydrologic issues upstream in both reservoirs. The main causes of flooding were not just related to a massive rainfall event, but also explosive urban expansion of land use upstream of reservoirs, altered and updated reservoir design issues, and lack of governmental action in the years leading up to the disaster. Potential long‐term solutions to the flooding and design problems are addressed in this article as well.

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Section: Harvey Rainfallmentioning

confidence: 99%

Upstream Addicks–Barker reservoir damages during Hurricane Harvey: A case study of urban hydrology and policy failure in Houston, TX

Furrh

Bedient

2023

J American Water Resour Assoc

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“…Regardless of the observed and future projected increase in extreme precipitation, the existing design standards for urban infrastructure and flood mitigation strategies in the US are based on the assumption of stationary climate (L. Cheng & AghaKouchak, 2014;Das et al, 2013). For example, the design precipitation estimates provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Atlas-14 are computed by considering stationary (i.e., no significant trends) extreme precipitation (Perica et al, 2018;Tousi et al, 2021;Underwood et al, 2020). Recent studies have challenged this assumption and demonstrated that the stationarity assumption considerably underestimate the design return levels in comparison to the nonstationarity based design precipitation for different parts of the US (L. Cheng & AghaKouchak, 2014;Vu & Mishra, 2019).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

An Integrative Framework for Assessment of Urban Flood Response to Changing Climate

Pal,

Saksena,

Dey

et al. 2023

Water Resources Research

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Increasing frequency of extreme rainfall induced catastrophic urban flood events in recent decades demands proactive efforts to assess flood risk and vulnerability. Here, we develop an integrative framework for fine spatiotemporal scale assessment of urban flood response to historical and future projected changes in extreme precipitation. The framework includes three main components – nonstationary modelling of historical extreme precipitation, modelling of future precipitation, and urban flood simulations. It also provides robust estimates of uncertainty in design precipitation from statistical modelling, multiple climate models and stochastic uncertainty, estimated using machine learning techniques. We demonstrate the proposed framework for White Oak Bayou watershed in Houston, Texas, US. Two‐dimensional hydrologic‐hydraulic Interconnected Channel and Pond Routing (ICPR) model is used to simulate flood response from design precipitation for historical (1986–2020) and two future (2021–2050 & 2071–2100) periods in three (SSP1‐2.5, SSP2‐4.5 and SSP5‐8.5) future climate scenarios. Results show that nonstationary design estimates for historical precipitation are 14–25% higher than the stationary estimates for 100‐year event of 1‐hour to 24‐hour duration. Contrary to general global trends, we found a significant reduction in future design precipitation in all three emission scenarios. Additionally, stochastic uncertainty in future design precipitations is found to be larger than the modelling uncertainty in historical estimates and climate model uncertainty in future estimates. Flood response in terms of peak flood and total flood volume suggests that the difference in stationary vs. nonstationary historical and future design precipitation are substantial to cause considerable change in simulated flood.

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Comments on “Flash Flood Verification: Pondering Precipitation Proxies”

Gourley

Vergara

2021

Journal of Hydrometeorology

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New operational tools for monitoring flash flooding based on radar quantitative precipitation estimates (QPEs) have become available to U.S. National Weather Service forecasters. Herman and Schumacher examined QPE exceedance thresholds for several tools and compared them to each other, to flash flood reports (FFRs), and to flash flood warnings. The Next Generation Radar network has been updated with dual-polarization capabilities since the publication of Herman and Schumacher, which has changed the characteristics of the derived QPEs. Updated thresholds on Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor version 12 products that are associated to FFRs are provided and thus can be used as guidance by the operational forecasting community and other end-users of the products.

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Precipitation-Frequency Atlas of the United States. Volume 11, Version 2.0. Texas.

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Upstream Addicks–Barker reservoir damages during Hurricane Harvey: A case study of urban hydrology and policy failure in Houston, TX

Upstream Addicks–Barker reservoir damages during Hurricane Harvey: A case study of urban hydrology and policy failure in Houston, TX

An Integrative Framework for Assessment of Urban Flood Response to Changing Climate

Comments on “Flash Flood Verification: Pondering Precipitation Proxies”

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