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Lecture

Floodplain Management

In course

ENV-424: Water resources engineering

Water resources engineering designs systems to control the quantity, quality, timing, and distribution of water to support human demands and the needs of the environment. ...

Description

This lecture discusses floodplains, their role during floods, and the impact of human activities on floodplain natural processes. It covers flood control measures, floodplain encroachments, and floodplain management strategies. The lecture also explores flood control alternatives, hydrologic analysis, and intensity-duration-frequency curves for rainfall. It delves into the determination of discharge, water stage, and damage analysis. Additionally, it examines the use of reservoirs for flood control, spillways, gates, weirs, and reservoir optimization. The analysis of discharge duration curves, exceedance frequency relationships, and the effects of reservoirs, raised levees, flood proofing, and channel modifications on flood management are also discussed.

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Instructors (2)

Cristiano Trevisin

Andrea Rinaldo

Official source

Related concepts (32)

Flood control

Flood control (or flood mitigation or flood protection or flood alleviation) methods are used to reduce or prevent the detrimental effects of flood waters. Flood relief methods are used to reduce the effects of flood waters or high water levels. Flooding can be caused by a mix of both natural processes, such as extreme weather upstream, and human changes to waterbodies and runoff. A distinction is made between structural and non-structural flood control measures.

Floodplain

A floodplain or flood plain or bottomlands is an area of land adjacent to a river. Floodplains stretch from the banks of a river channel to the base of the enclosing valley, and experience flooding during periods of high discharge. The soils usually consist of clays, silts, sands, and gravels deposited during floods. Because of regular flooding, floodplains frequently have high soil-fertility since nutrients are deposited with the flood waters.

Flood

A flood is an overflow of water (or rarely other fluids) that submerges land that is usually dry. In the sense of "flowing water", the word may also be applied to the inflow of the tide. Floods are an area of study of the discipline hydrology and are of significant concern in agriculture, civil engineering and public health. Human changes to the environment often increase the intensity and frequency of flooding, for example land use changes such as deforestation and removal of wetlands, changes in waterway course or flood controls such as with levees, and larger environmental issues such as climate change and sea level rise.

Reservoir

A reservoir (ˈrɛzərvwɑːr; from French réservoir ʁezɛʁvwaʁ) is an enlarged lake behind a dam. Such a dam may be either artificial, usually built to store fresh water, or it may be a natural formation. Reservoirs can be created in a number of ways, including controlling a watercourse that drains an existing body of water, interrupting a watercourse to form an embayment within it, excavating, or building any number of retaining walls or levees.

Weir

A weir wɪə or low-head dam is a barrier across the width of a river that alters the flow characteristics of water and usually results in a change in the height of the river level. Weirs are also used to control the flow of water for outlets of lakes, ponds, and reservoirs. There are many weir designs, but commonly water flows freely over the top of the weir crest before cascading down to a lower level. There is no single definition as to what constitutes a weir, and one English dictionary simply defines a weir as a small dam.

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