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  • Urban-Flood Frequency
  • Flood-Depth Frequency
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  • Catoma Creek

• Mobile NAWQA Study

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Flood Depth Frequency

Project Chief: Katie Lee
Cooperator: Alabama Department of Transportation
Period of Project: 2008-2010

The approach to determine flood depths for hydraulic design and for floodplain mapping typically is to determine flood-frequency discharges by the best available methods and to use an open channel hydraulic model to obtain flood elevations, flow distributions, and velocities. Although these data are essential for many bridge and culvert design applications, this is an expensive approach because of the necessary data. In cases where flood management and planning requires only a flood elevation an alternative approach is to estimate flood depths directly without determining discharge or applying a hydraulic model. The objective of this project is to develop improved methods and equations for estimating flood-depth frequency for streams in Alabama. The end product of the flood-depth frequency study will be a USGS Scientific Investigations Report describing development and use of traditional regression methods for estimating flood depths for streams with recur­rence intervals ranging from 1.5- to 100- years throughout Alabama.