• DOI:10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00198.1
• Corpus ID: 124179218

A Unified Flash Flood Database across the United States

@article{Gourley2013AUF,
  title={A Unified Flash Flood Database across the United States},
  author={Jonathan J. Gourley and Yang Hong and Zachary L. Flamig and Ami Arthur and Robert Alfred Clark and Martin Calianno and Isabelle Ruin and Terry W. Ortel and Michael Wieczorek and Pierre‐Emmanuel Kirstetter and Edward Clark and Witold F. Krajewski},
  journal={Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society},
  year={2013},
  volume={94},
  pages={799-805}
}

• J. Gourley, Y. Hong, +9 authors W. Krajewski
• Published 1 June 2013
• Environmental Science
• Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

Despite flash flooding being one of the most deadly and costly weather-related natural hazards worldwide, individual datasets to characterize them in the United States are hampered by limited documentation and can be difficult to access. This study is the first of its kind to assemble, reprocess, describe, and disseminate a georeferenced U.S. database providing a long-term, detailed characterization of flash flooding in terms of spatiotemporal behavior and specificity of impacts. The database is composed of three primary sources: 1) the entire archive of automated discharge observations from the U.S. Geological Survey that has been reprocessed to describe individual flooding events, 2) flash-flooding reports collected by the National Weather Service from 2006 to the present, and 3) witness reports obtained directly from the public in the Severe Hazards Analysis and Verification Experiment during the summers 2008–10. Each observational data source has limitations; a major asset of the unified flash flood d...