U.S.
GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
Open-File Report 02-253
Fifty-Year Flood-Inundation Maps for Juticalpa, Honduras
By
D.L. Kresch, M.C. Mastin, and T.D. Olsen
ABSTRACT
After the devastating floods caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, maps of the areas and depths of 50-year-flood inundation at 15 municipalities in Honduras were prepared as a tool for agencies involved in reconstruction and planning. This report, which is one in a series of 15, presents maps of areas in the municipality of Juticalpa that would be inundated by a 50-year flood of Río Juticalpa. Geographic Information System (GIS) coverages of the flood inundation are available on a computer in the municipality of Juticalpa as part of the Municipal GIS project and on the Internet at the Flood Hazard Mapping Web page (http://mitchnts1.cr.usgs.gov/projects/floodhazard.html). These coverages allow users to view the flood inundation in much more detail than is possible using the maps in this report.
Water-surface elevations for a 50-year-flood on Río Juticalpa at Juticalpa were estimated using HEC-RAS, a one-dimensional, steady-flow, step-backwater computer program. The channel and floodplain cross sections used in HEC-RAS were developed from an airborne light-detection-and-ranging (LIDAR) topographic survey of the area. The estimated 50-year-flood discharge for Río Juticalpa at Juticalpa, 1,360 cubic meters per second, was computed as the drainage-area-adjusted weighted average of two independently estimated 50-year-flood discharges for the gaging station Río Juticalpa en El Torito, located about 2 kilometers upstream from Juticalpa. One discharge, 1,551 cubic meters per second, was estimated from a frequency analysis of the 33 years of peak-discharge record for the gage, and the other, 486 cubic meters per second, was estimated from a regression equation that relates the 50-year-flood discharge to drainage area and mean annual precipitation. The weighted-average of the two discharges at the gage is 1,310 cubic meters per second. The 50-year flood discharge for the study area reach of Río Juticalpa was estimated by multiplying the weighted discharge at the gage by the ratio of the drainage areas upstream from the two locations.
Abstract
Introduction
Description of Study Area
Fifty-Year Flood Discharge
Water-Surface Profile of the 50-Year Flood
Fifty-Year Flood-Inundation Maps
Data Availability
References Cited
This report and associated figures are available online in Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have the Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader, it is available for free download from Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Download the report (PDF, 1.9 MB)
Select
11x17 high resolution versions of Figure
1 (PDF, 4.2 MB)
and Figure 4 (PDF, 550 KB) to view
or print.
Geographic Information System coverages of flood inundation and flood depth are available at
http://mitchnts1.cr.usgs.gov/projects/floodhazard.html
Document Accessibility: Adobe Systems Incorporated has information about PDFs and the visually impaired. This information provides tools to help make PDF files accessible. These tools convert Adobe PDF documents into HTML or ASCII text, which then can be read by a number of common screen-reading programs that synthesize text as audible speech. In addition, an accessible version of Acrobat Reader 5.0 for Windows (English only), which contains support for screen readers, is available. These tools and the accessible reader may be obtained free from Adobe at Adobe Access.
Send questions or comments about this report to the author, David L. Kresch (dlkresch@usgs.gov) 253.428.3600 ext. 2683.
For more information about USGS activities in Washington, visit the USGS Washington District home page.
| AccessibilityFOIAPrivacyPolicies and Notices | |
  |
|