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No description available.

A major area targeted for hydrometeorological forecast service improvements is in flash flood forecasting. Verification data show that general public service products of flash flood forecasts do not provide enough lead time in order for the public to make effective response. Sophisticated users of flash flood forecasts could use forecast probabilities of flash flooding in order to make decisions in preparation for the predicted event. To this end, a systematic probabilistic approach to flash flood forecasting is presented. The work first describes a deterministic system which serves as a conceptual basis for the probability system. The approach uses accumulated rainfall plus potential rainfall over a specified area and time period, and assesses this amount against the water holding capacity of the affected basin. These parameters are modeled as random variables in the probabilistic approach. The effects of uncertain measurements of rainfall and forecasts of precipitation from multiple information sources within a time period and moving forward in time are resolved through the use of Bayes' Theorem. The effect of uncertain inflows and outflows of atmospheric moisture on the states of the system, the transformation of variables, is resolved by use of convolution. Requirements for probability distributions to satisfy Bayes' Theorem are discussed in terms of the types and physical basis of meteorological data needed. The feasibility of obtaining the data is evaluated. Two alternatives for calculating the soil moisture deficit are presented--one, an online automatic rainfall/runoff model, the other an approximation. Using the soil moisture approximation, a software program was developed to test the probabilistic approach. A storm event was simulated and compared against an actual flash flood event. Results of the simulation improved forecast lead time by 3-5 hours over the actual forecasts issued at the time of the event.

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No description available.

No description available.

Methods of estimating floods with return periods of up to one hundred years are reasonably well established, and in the main rely on extrapolation of historical flood data at the site of interest. However, extrapolating the tails of fitted probability distributions to higher return periods is very unreliable and cannot provide a satisfactory basis for extreme flood estimation. The probable maximum flood concept is an alternative approach, which is often used for critical cases such as the location of nuclear power plants, and is viewed as a consequence of a combination of a probable maximum precipitation with the worst possible prevailing catchment conditions. Return periods are not usually quoted although they are implicitly thought to be of the order of tens of thousand of years. There are many less critical situations which still justify greater flood protection than would be provided for an estimated one-hundred year flood. There is therefore a need for techniques which can be used to estimate floods with return periods of up to several thousand years. The predictive approach adopted here involves a combination of a probabilistic storm transposition technique with a physically-based distributed rainfall-runoff model. Extreme historical storms within a meteorologically homogeneous region are, conceptually, moved to the catchment of interest, and their return periods are estimated within a probabilistic framework. Known features of storms such as depth, duration, and perhaps approximate shape will, together with catchment characteristics, determine much of the runoff response. But there are other variables which also have an effect and these include the space-time distribution of rainfall within the storm, storm velocity and antecedent catchment conditions. The effects of all these variables on catchment response are explored.

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No description available.

No description available.