Flood science
....working towards a better understanding of flood frequency, how floods change river landscapes, and what floods from the past can reveal about future floods.
Floods constitute one of the most globally pervasive and persistent natural hazards despite significant advances being made in meteorological and hydrological forecasting in the last 50 years. Instrumented river discharge records rarely span more than 200 years for most locations. This is problematic for implementing flood resiliency planning since large floods tend to occur less frequently, making them underrepresented in instrumented records of river discharge. Paleoflood deposits (sediments deposited by floods that occurred hundreds or thousands of years ago) can be used to reconstruct flood size and frequency and provide a means of gathering flood information that pre-dates the instrumented record.
Previously, we used flood deposits to explain how sediment storage in rivers changed drastically over the last few centuries owing to landuse change and decadal drought (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2015.04.005 and https://doi.org/10.1353/sgo.2010.0012).
Currently, we are using paleoflood deposits to examine changes in flood frequency and magnitude throughout the Holocene for the Tennessee River (Figs. 1-5). This research is being funded by Tennessee Valley Authority. So far we have found deposits of four historical floods of record on the TN River and identified numerous paleofloods. Our preliminary findings suggest that the last ~1000 years have been a more active period for flooding than the preceding millennia on the TN River. You can view recent media coverage of this work in the news section of this site: Fluviograms.
Floods constitute one of the most globally pervasive and persistent natural hazards despite significant advances being made in meteorological and hydrological forecasting in the last 50 years. Instrumented river discharge records rarely span more than 200 years for most locations. This is problematic for implementing flood resiliency planning since large floods tend to occur less frequently, making them underrepresented in instrumented records of river discharge. Paleoflood deposits (sediments deposited by floods that occurred hundreds or thousands of years ago) can be used to reconstruct flood size and frequency and provide a means of gathering flood information that pre-dates the instrumented record.
Previously, we used flood deposits to explain how sediment storage in rivers changed drastically over the last few centuries owing to landuse change and decadal drought (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2015.04.005 and https://doi.org/10.1353/sgo.2010.0012).
Currently, we are using paleoflood deposits to examine changes in flood frequency and magnitude throughout the Holocene for the Tennessee River (Figs. 1-5). This research is being funded by Tennessee Valley Authority. So far we have found deposits of four historical floods of record on the TN River and identified numerous paleofloods. Our preliminary findings suggest that the last ~1000 years have been a more active period for flooding than the preceding millennia on the TN River. You can view recent media coverage of this work in the news section of this site: Fluviograms.