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Abstract Compound floods are often thought of as large, infrequent floods during which extremes of coastal sea level and/or river flow combine with each other or additional factors (e.g., tides and rainfall) to induce major flooding. However, little is known about the potentially compound nature of more frequent, lower‐level floods. Here, we introduce the term “compound minor floods” to define minor floods composed of two or more water‐level sources. We use the Delaware River Estuary as a case study to investigate the prevalence and composition of these minor compound floods along the extent of a tidal river. We apply multiple linear regression to a 22‐year time series of coastal water levels and river discharge to establish the contributions of tides, nontidal open‐ocean effects, and river discharge to minor flood events at eight locations along the tidal Delaware River. We find that most minor flood events are compound in nature, requiring at least two components (e.g., tides and river discharge) to initiate flooding. We identify spatial structure in the relative importance of oceanographic and riverine contributions to minor flooding along the tidal reach of the estuary. These results suggest that incorporating fluvial components into minor flooding assessments is important to fully characterize flood risk along tidal rivers and estuaries.
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Effect of Compound Flooding on Performance of Earthen Levees
Earthen levees protecting coastal regions can be exposed to compound flooding induced by multiple drivers such as coastal water level, river discharge, and precipitation. However, the majority of flood hazard analyses consider only one flood driver at a time. This study numerically investigates the performance of an earthen levee in Sherman Island, Sacramento, CA, under compound flooding induced by fluvial and pluvial flooding. A finite element model is built for fully coupled 3D stress-flow simulations of the levee. The finite element model is then used to simulate the hydro-mechanical response of the levee under different flood scenarios. Fluvial flood hydrographs for different scenarios are obtained using a bivariate extreme analysis of peak river discharge and peak ocean level while accounting for the significance of correlation between these two variables. Pluvial flooding is characterized using intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves of extreme precipitations for the study area. The fluvial and pluvial flood patterns for different recurrence intervals are used in the finite element model to simulate the hydro-mechanical response of the levee. Results show that considering compound flooding leads to 8.7% and 18.6% reduction in the factor of safety for 2 and 50-year recurrence intervals, respectively.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1634748
- PAR ID:
- 10202914
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Geo-Congress 2020: Engineering, Monitoring, and Management of Geotechnical Infrastructure, Geotechnical Special Publication No. 316
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 707 to 716
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784482797.069
