Design and quantification of an extreme winter storm scenario for emergency preparedness and planning exercises in California

Natural Hazards
By: , and 

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Abstract

The USGS Multihazards Project is working with numerous agencies to evaluate and plan for hazards and damages that could be caused by extreme winter storms impacting California. Atmospheric and hydrological aspects of a hypothetical storm scenario have been quantified as a basis for estimation of human, infrastructure, economic, and environmental impacts for emergency-preparedness and flood-planning exercises. In order to ensure scientific defensibility and necessary levels of detail in the scenario description, selected historical storm episodes were concatentated to describe a rapid arrival of several major storms over the state, yielding precipitation totals and runoff rates beyond those occurring during the individual historical storms. This concatenation allowed the scenario designers to avoid arbitrary scalings and is based on historical occasions from the 19th and 20th Centuries when storms have stalled over the state and when extreme storms have arrived in rapid succession. Dynamically consistent, hourly precipitation, temperatures, barometric pressures (for consideration of storm surges and coastal erosion), and winds over California were developed for the so-called ARkStorm scenario by downscaling the concatenated global records of the historical storm sequences onto 6- and 2-km grids using a regional weather model of January 1969 and February 1986 storm conditions. The weather model outputs were then used to force a hydrologic model to simulate ARkStorm runoff, to better understand resulting flooding risks. Methods used to build this scenario can be applied to other emergency, nonemergency and non-California applications.

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Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title Design and quantification of an extreme winter storm scenario for emergency preparedness and planning exercises in California
Series title Natural Hazards
DOI 10.1007/s11069-011-9894-5
Volume 60
Issue 3
Year Published 2012
Language English
Publisher Springer Link
Contributing office(s) Earthquake Hazards Program, National Research Program - Western Branch
Description 27 p.
First page 1085
Last page 1111
Country United States
State California
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