Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/04/2024
11:45 AM - 1:00 PM
Location
MAE 303
Categories
Speaker: Stacey Archfield, PH.D. Research Hydrologist, USGS
Title: The future of design-flood forecasting: Adjusting for non-stationarity in floods and low-streamflow statistics
Frequency-based streamflow statistics (such as the 100-year
flood and the 7Q10 lowflow statistic, the lowest 7-day average
flow that is expected to occur once every 10 years) are needed
for many different water applications in the United States,
including infrastructure design, the National Flood Insurance
Program, wastewater discharge regulation, and flood
mitigation. The intensification of the water cycle over recent
decades has produced changes – referred to as nonstationarity
– in hydrologic extremes (floods and droughts)
unevenly across the globe and the U.S. is not an exception.
As the Nation’s objective resource for land-surface
information, the U.S. Geological Survey has responded by
developing a set of interpretative studies and related datasets
to understand changes in floods and droughts, the potential
drivers of these changes, and strategies for updating
frequency-based statistics for hydrological extremes. This
presentation will highlight recent advancements in data and
interpretation on hydrologic extremes as well as the detection
of changes in, attribution of, and adjustment for nonstationarity
in frequency-based statistics.