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Governance of Long-Duration Floods

Consequences of long-term inundation of floodplains, residential and commercial areas, and critical infrastructure systems cannot be fully comprehended without a clear understanding of the variability in the duration of the floods. Long-duration floods can cause substantial damages and prolonged interruptions to water resources facilities and critical infrastructure systems. Analyses of their causal structure are invaluable for evaluating reservoir and river system operation policies and for flood preparation. Despite its importance, most of the recent flood-related studies have not formally explained the physical mechanisms of long-duration flood events that can evoke substantial damages to properties and infrastructure systems.

A two-layer network model for Bayesian inference of the coupled regional flood duration scaling and atmospheric dynamic scaling of the flood duration
A two-layer network model for Bayesian inference of the coupled regional flood duration scaling and atmospheric dynamic scaling of the flood duration. The complex interaction of geopotential height dipole index (GPH-di), vertical integral of water vapor (viWV), divergence of wind (divW), maximum of preceding cumulative exceeding flow (CEI), and flood duration is shown at the top. The boxplots indicate the scaling factors of flood duration (α, β) for each reservoir (dam) and their corresponding atmospheric dynamic scaling factors (γ1, γ2, γ3, γ4). The red and blue-colored plots demonstrate the probability of occurrence of long-duration flood (21 days and above) derived from the predictive flood duration model and the observed flood duration, respectively.
Written by
Naresh Devineni, City University of New York (City College)

Nasser Najibi1, Naresh Devineni1, Mengqian Lu2, and Rui A. P. Perdigão3

1City University of New York (City College), USA

2Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China

3University of Lisbon, Portugal