Browsing by Subject "Flooding"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Applied Solutions for Water Resource Challenges: Floods, Contamination and Upland Water Storage
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2011-04-08) Smith, Amy; Tedesco, Lenore P.; Babbar-Sebens, Meghna; Barr, Robert C.; Hall, Bob E.; Stouder, Michael
    The Center for Earth and Environmental Science, an IUPUI Signature Center, is working on a series of water resources problems and creating solutions. A series of collaborative projects are underway with the HUD, FEMA, the Office of Community and Rural Affairs, the United States Geological Survey, the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, and an international corporate partner in Berlin, KompetenzZentrum Wasser Berlin. Flood Erosion Hazard Program CEES, the USGS, and Polis are working with HUD and the Office of Community and Rural Affairs, though the Indiana Silver Jackets, to create tools for the State of Indiana to incorporate flood erosion hazard risk assessments into community planning. Flooding remains the most costly natural hazard in the US and Indiana. Flood losses continue to rise despite billions of dollars in mitigation. The causes are complex and related to land use, infrastructure design and climate change. Following the June 2008 floods in Indiana, 39 counties were listed as Federal disaster areas. In early 2005, 90% of Indiana counties were declared federal disaster areas after heavy rains fell on saturated soil. There have been seven major regional flooding events since the “Great flood of 1913”. The frequency of large floods appears to be increasing. Four of the eight major floods have occurred since 1982 and the last two occurred in 2005 and 2008. From 1998 through 2007, total insured flood losses in Indiana exceeded $39.8 million. While more restricted in area than the floods of 2008; record flooding occurred again throughout central and southern Indiana in early 2011 following heavy rains in February and March. Traditional flood protection usually consists of three components: flood control reservoirs, urban levees/floodwalls, and agricultural levees. These traditional flood protection methods are focused on one aspect of flooding – inundation. However, the largest single source of flood losses, both in terms of cost and number of affected persons, is damage to transportation infrastructure. Fluvial erosion is a principal cause of this damage. This significant flood-related natural hazard – the “fluvial erosion hazard” (FEH) – is not a specific component of State and local mitigation programs. This project aims to generate the tools for inclusion of FEH into statewide and local community planning. Aquisafe II - Performance Analysis of Selected Mitigation Systems Used to Attenuate Non-Point Source Agricultural Pollution Aquisafe is an international research collaboration with Veolia Environment based in Paris, their corporate partner in Berlin (KompetenzZentrum Wasser – Berlin Center of Competence for Water), the German Federal Environmental Agency, German university partners, and French quasi-governmental agencies in Brittany, France. The project goals are to create new mitigation systems to capture and treat polluted agricultural water running off farm fields prior to flowing into area streams, especially those used for drinking water supplies. The contaminants of specific concern are nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) and pesticides (atrazine – a corn-herbicide with potential endocrine disrupting effects). We are testing 2-stage, constructed wetlands in Indianapolis, Indiana and Brittany, France that have been designed to intercept and convert contaminants to harmless compounds. Site designs are guided by laboratory technical scale experiments conducted in Berlin that identified the hydrologic retention times and suitable sources of organic carbon necessary for mitigating contaminants. Construction of the experimental systems will begin in April in the Eagle Creek Watershed in cooperation with a private farmer with initial results expected this summer.
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    Investigating the Effects of Synoptic-Scale Climatic Processes on Local-Scale Hydrology by Combining Multi-Proxy Analyses of Lacustrine Sediments and Instrumental Records
    (2022-09) Gibson, Derek Keith; Bird, Broxton; Gilhooly, William, III; Jacinthe, Pierre-André; Licht, Kathy; Wang, Xianzhong
    Paleoclimate records from North and South America were used to develop a holistic understanding of global paleo-hydroclimatic drivers across a range of boundary conditions. Here, geophysical analysis of lacustrine sediment stratigraphy at Lago de Tota, Boyaca, Colombia provided evidence for significant lake-level fluctuations through the late Quaternary and produced a record that potentially spans the last 60 ka. Seismic data revealed a series of off-lap and on-lap sequences in the upper ~20 m of sediments that indicated large amplitude changes in lake-level, driven by variability in the mean latitude of the Intertropical Convergence Zone as controlled by insolation- and ocean circulation-driven hemispheric temperature gradients during glacial/stadial and interglacial/interstadial events. In North America, late Holocene flood recurrence in the Midwest and Holocene changes in the mean latitude of the polar front jet stream were investigated through multi-proxy examinations of sediment cores collected from swale lakes in northern Kentucky and southern Indiana, and a glacially formed kettle lake in northern Indiana. These results showed that the midlatitude jet stream was displaced to the south during the late Holocene, which increased the amount of Midwestern precipitation sourced from the northern Pacific and Arctic, especially during prolonged cool conditions. During these cool periods, when atmospheric flow was meridional and a greater amount of precipitation was delivered from the northerly sources, Ohio River flooding increased. During warm conditions, when clockwise mean-state atmospheric circulation advected southerly moisture from the Gulf of Mexico into the Midwest, flooding on the Ohio River decreased. At present, streamflow in the Midwest is demonstrated here to be generally increasing, despite atmospheric conditions typically associated with reduced streamflow in the paleo-record, due in part to increasing precipitation and modern land-use dynamics. Together, these studies demonstrate the sensitivity and vulnerability of local-scale hydrological processes to synoptic climate change.
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    Using sediment accumulation rates in floodplain paleochannel lakes to reconstruct climate-flood relationships on the lower Ohio River
    (Elsevier, 2022-12-15) Gibson , Derek K.; Bird, Broxton W.; Pollard, Harvie J.; Nealy, Cameron A.; Barr, Robert C.; Escobar, Jaime; Earth and Environmental Sciences, School of Science
    Late Holocene flood frequencies on the lower Ohio River were investigated using 14C-based sedimentation rates from three floodplain lakes located in Illinois (Avery Lake), Kentucky (Grassy Pond), and Indiana (Goose Pond). Changes in sediment accumulation rates were attributed to variability in the delivery of overbank sediment to each site as controlled by the frequency of Ohio River flooding. Sedimentation rates reached their lowest values in all three lakes between 400 and 1230 CE, indicating a regional reduction in flood frequencies on the lower Ohio River during a period that included the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; ca. 950–1250 CE). Sedimentation rates increased after ca. 1230 CE and remained moderately high through the Little Ice Age (LIA; 1350–1820 CE) until the onset of extensive land clearance during the early 1800s CE. After 1820 CE, sedimentation rates increased further and were higher than any other time during the late Holocene. A comparison of regional paleoclimatic proxies with the above floodplain sedimentation records shows that Ohio River flooding during the late Holocene was responsive to mean-state changes in atmospheric circulation. During the MCA, when clockwise mean-state atmospheric circulation advected southerly moisture from the Gulf of Mexico into the Ohio River Valley primarily in the form of convective rainstorms, flooding on the Ohio River was least frequent. During the LIA, meridional mean-state atmospheric circulation increased the proportion of midcontinental moisture that was sourced from the northern Pacific and Arctic and delivered as snowfall, hence increasing flooding on the Ohio River. We attribute the increase in Ohio River flooding during the LIA to an increase in snowpack volume across the Ohio River Valley and the watershed-scale integration of runoff during spring snowmelt. Following Euro-American land clearance in the early 1800s, flood frequencies decoupled from this relationship and the lower Ohio River became susceptible to frequent flooding, despite a return to southerly and clockwise synoptic atmospheric conditions. These modern climate-flood dynamics are fundamentally different than those of the paleo-record and suggest that land-use changes – such as deforestation, tile draining, and landscape conversion to intensive row crop agriculture – have fundamentally altered the modern Midwestern hydrologic cycle.