Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID NV-GUO-104g

Flooding Frequency and Severity across the Wildfire Continuum throughout the Western United States.

Institute: Nevada
USGS Grant Number:
Year Established: 2024 Start Date: 2025-01-01 End Date: 2027-12-31
Total Federal Funds: $296,458 Total Non-Federal Funds: $296,458

Principal Investigators: Guo Yu

Project Summary: Engineers and scientists need to better understand and model the hydrologic effects of land development across urbanizing watersheds, for multiple applications. For example, floods should increase if 40% of a basin’s surface were converted from agricultural to commercial use, which would impact the design of a new culvert. To represent the level of urbanization, we traditionally use the proportion of impervious surfaces. However, this cannot reflect the spatial arrangement of the different types of land patches, which determines how much runoff is generated and how fast it can travel downstream, affecting the flood response. We propose a new modeling approach that explicitly considers this aspect, resulting in improved predictions of peak flows in ungauged basins. We use this method to better understand why peak flows sometimes decrease after urbanization. We also streamline the computer procedures to implement the approach across the U.S., in an app accessible to the public.