Evaluating flood potential with GRACE in the United States

Molodtsova, Tatiana; Molodtsov, Sergey; Kirilenko, Andrei; Zhang, Xiaodong; VanLooy, Jeffrey

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-16-1011-2016

Articles | Volume 16, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-16-1011-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-16-1011-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 4

Research article

|

25 Apr 2016

Research article |

| 25 Apr 2016

Evaluating flood potential with GRACE in the United States

Tatiana Molodtsova, Sergey Molodtsov, Andrei Kirilenko, Xiaodong Zhang, and Jeffrey VanLooy

Data sets

CPC Merged Analysis of Precipitation Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC), NASA http://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/giovanni/

Global Active Archive of Large Flood Events Dartmouth Flood Observatory, University of Colorado http://ﬂoodobservatory.colorado.edu/Archives/index.html

GRACE Release-5 10/2012 TWSA product GRACE Tellus, NASA http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/data/get-data/monthly-mass-grids-land/

Retrieve Summary of Recent Flood and High Flow Conditions US Geological Survey http://waterwatch.usgs.gov/?id=wwdp2

Short summary

One of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) products, the Terrestrial Water Storage Anomaly (TWSA), was used for assessing large-scale flood risk. The efficacy of the methodology was evaluated over the continental USA. The method exhibits higher skill in predicting the large-area, long-duration floods, especially during the summer season.