Flood Potential: West Coast Region
The West Coast region has been added to the ongoing Flood Potential analysis of the United States; the results are available on the project website.
The Flood Potential method helps practitioners estimate the magnitude of expected floods, compare how floods vary across regions, detect trends in flood magnitudes, and better communicate flood hazards with land managers and the public. This methodology was developed to be used in combination with existing flood-frequency methods, and assists practitioners with answering such questions as:
- What large flood magnitudes can be expected at a given ungaged location, for designing infrastructure?
- How reasonable are the results of regional flood frequency regression equations?
- Is a flood frequency analysis at a specific streamgage providing reasonable results, or are results biased due to the presence or absence of a large flood?
- What areas are inherently prone to larger or smaller floods (have a larger or smaller flood potential index)? This helps make more informed decisions regarding: erosion hazards of stream corridors; the inherent risks of stream restoration; and the risks of wildfire-induced flooding or debris flows on communities.
- Is a specific flood extreme, or rather a typical large flood?
- Compared to other floods in the area, how extreme is a flood?
- Are floods increasing in magnitude over time?