529 Quantifying the Hydrometeorological Conditions of Watersheds Impacted by Flash Floods in the Northeast United States

Wednesday, 9 January 2013
Exhibit Hall 3 (Austin Convention Center)
Rebecca Marjerison, Cornell University, ITHACA, NY; and T. Walter, S. Jessup, and S. Colucci

The susceptibility of a watershed to flash flooding arises from a combination of landscape hydrological conditions and the meteorological conditions of a given storm. If the rainfall volume exceeds the storage capacity, or the rainfall intensity exceeds the infiltration capacity of a critical fraction of a watershed, the result is a flood. The details of these hydrometeorological conditions and their interactions are not currently well understood, especially for the Northeast United States. Our analyses show some of the relationships between storm characteristics and watershed characteristics for a sample of flash flood events in the Northeast US. Understanding more about the combinations of landscape conditions with storm characteristics that lead to flash floods will improve prediction power for these events.
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