Articles | Volume 21, issue 2
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-559-2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-559-2021
Research article
 | 
05 Feb 2021
Research article |  | 05 Feb 2021

Simulating historical flood events at the continental scale: observational validation of a large-scale hydrodynamic model

Oliver E. J. Wing, Andrew M. Smith, Michael L. Marston, Jeremy R. Porter, Mike F. Amodeo, Christopher C. Sampson, and Paul D. Bates

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Cited articles

Alfieri, L., Salamon, P., Bianchi, A., Neal, J., Bates, P., and Feyen, L.: Advances in pan-European flood hazard mapping, Hydrol. Process., 28, 4067–4077, https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.9947, 2014. 
Altenau, E. H., Pavelsky, T. M., Moller, D., Lion, C., Pitcher, L. H., Allen, G. H., Bates, P. D., Calmant, S., Durand, M., and Smith, L. C.: AirSWOT measurements of river water surface elevation and slope: Tanana River, AK, Geophys. Res. Lett., 44, 181–189, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL071577, 2017a. 
Altenau, E. H., Pavelsky, T. M., Bates, P. D., and Neal, J. C.: The effects of spatial resolution and dimensionality on modeling regional-scale hydraulics in a multichannel river, Water Resour. Res., 53, 1683–1701, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016WR019396, 2017b. 
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Short summary
Global flood models are difficult to validate. They generally output theoretical flood events of a given probability rather than an observed event that they can be tested against. Here, we adapt a US-wide flood model to enable the rapid simulation of historical flood events in order to more robustly understand model biases. For 35 flood events, we highlight the challenges of model validation amidst observational data errors yet evidence the increasing skill of large-scale models.
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