Predicting Flash Floods

Reported July 2009

BOULDER, Co. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- People living near vulnerable rivers and creeks may soon be able to get advance notice of potentially dangerous flash floods. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is testing an innovative flood prediction system.

"You might imagine a nice afternoon where there are people either fly fishing or tubing or just wading out in the water, you can have an actual nice sunny day down here in Boulder, but shortly up the canyon in the mountains you could have a localized intense storm event." Susan Golden told Ivanhoe.

A storm event that can put children, parents and pets downstream at risk.

"I know they talk about flash flood happening here, but I never actually heard of it in the time I have been here or pretty much been alive," Golden said.

Dave Gochis, a hydrometeorologist at NCAR in Boulder, Col., says a new flash flood prediction system can save lives.

"There are a series of these kinds of gauges strung all along the Boulder Creek watershed or right along the stem of the creek here, so in the event of a flood, it will trigger an alarm which people can react to," Gochis explained.

Using real-time measurements and forecasts from the national weather service, NCAR scientists aim to predict rising water even before it's rained.

"The flash flood event is usually those very rapid rises over the time of usually minutes, or tens of minutes to an hour, or couple of hours," Gochis said. "Oftentimes there's a poorly perceived threat by the public as to what dangerous levels are. It doesn't take much water at all -- moving water -- to create a force that can move either a person or a vehicle downstream that they wouldn't be able to recover from."

The new system may give people the time they need to survive the storm.

So far the warning system is showing promise, but has not been fully tested. Meteorologists say there's no way to know for sure if it will warn people in time, until an actual flood event happens.

The American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

David Gochis
UCAR
Boulder, CO
(303) 497-2809
gochis@ucar.edu

American Meteorological Society
Boston, MA 02108-3693
(617) 227-2425
http://www.ametsoc.org

Peter Weiss
American Geophysical Union
Washington, DC 20009-1277
(800) 966-2481
http://www.agu.org
pweiss@agu.org

Without warning, flash floods kill more than 100 people each year. Now a new way to predict potentially fatal flooding before it even rains

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