Business, Government Legal News from throughout WVResearchers looking at patterns to predict large floods

Researchers looking at patterns to predict large floods

Spring floods on the Ohio River last year caused the usual problems of closed highways and delayed shipments of bulk commodities. Researchers from Columbia University in New York are trying to determine if such floods can be predicted more than a few days in advance.

"This is about trying to see if there is any predictability to these flood events. In the past it's always been assumed there's no hope to predict theme beyond the weather forecast," said Andrew W. Robertson of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia.

The spring 2011 flood was the 25^th highest on record at Huntington. It was the largest flood since 1997, which was about 5 feet higher and was the 10^th highest on record. In Wheeling, the flood was farther down the list. It was only the 36^th highest on record.

Farther down the valley, though, it was much more devastating. At Paducah, Ky., it was the second highest flood on record. At the mouth of the Ohio at Cairo, Ill., the 2011 flood topped the 1937 flood, and parts of the town were evacuated because of fears the floodwall might fail.

Robertson and three other researchers presented a paper at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration workshop in Fort Worth, Texas, in October outlining their study to determine if certain patterns in the atmosphere and elsewhere, such as the Pacific Ocean, can provide earlier warnings of severe flooding to come.

The paper says early results point to an anomalous northward moisture transport in a "moist conveyor belt" from the Gulf of Mexico and the tropical Atlantic Ocean, focused by convergence with the Bermuda High and other events.

Floods, like tornados, tend to occur in spring because of snow melts and tight temperature gradients between cold air coming in form the north and warm air from the south, Robertson said.

"Basically this is a research project. There is no end result of this research yet," Robertson said.

"It looked to us that the La Nina event played a strong contributing role in the event of this year," he said. However, "it's not the whole story," he added.

Jennifer Nakamura, another researcher on the project, has studied 20 flood events from 1901 through early 2011. She focused on weather patterns nine days and 60 days before major floods. She said she has found some similarities in weather patterns.

It appears that high pressure systems to the east of the Ohio Valley coupled with low pressure systems to the west about nine to 10 days before a flood are good indications something will happen, she said.

"The moisture is always there. It's the circulation pattern that's driving it," she said.

Robertson said the paper presented in October will be followed by more research.