EES Seminar: The future of design-flood forecasting

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Frequency-based streamflow statistics (such as the 100-year flood and the 7Q10 lowflow statistic, the lowest 7-day average flow that is expected to occur once every 10 years) are needed for many different water applications in the United States, including infrastructure design, the National Flood Insurance Program, wastewater discharge regulation, and flood mitigation. The intensification of the water cycle over recent decades has produced changes – referred to as nonstationarity – in hydrologic extremes (floods and droughts) unevenly across the globe and the U.S. is not an exception. As the Nation’s objective resource for land-surface information, the U.S. Geological Survey has responded by developing a set of interpretative studies and related datasets to understand changes in floods and droughts, the potential drivers of these changes, and strategies for updating frequency-based statistics for hydrological extremes. This presentation will highlight recent advancements in data and interpretation on hydrologic extremes as well as the detection of changes in, attribution of, and adjustment for nonstationarity in frequency-based statistics.

Dr. Stacey Archfield is a Research Hydrologist with the USGS Water Resources Mission Area in Reston, Virginia. Dr. Archfield leads research teams focused on characterizing and predicting drought and other hydrologic extremes. Her research is focused on understanding hydrologic change for water resources applications. She is a Co- Executive Editor of the Hydrological Sciences Journal, a former Editor of Hydrology and Earth Systems Science, and a former Associate Editor of Water Resources Research. She holds a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Tufts University, a M.S. in Geosystems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in Geology from Northeastern University. Dr. Archfield’s work has been the subject of federal briefings, media interviews as well as invitations to speak as a keynote panel member and plenary speaker at professional conferences.