Since the mid-2000s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has placed increasing emphasis on the development, use, and application of risk analysis for the dam and levee safety program. USACE has moved from a solely standards-based approach for its dam safety program to a dam safety portfolio risk management approach (USACE, 2014). A key input to risk analysis is an estimate of the flood hazard. To assist engineers and scientists in hydrologic inputs to risk analysis, a review and discussion course on seminal papers in flood hydrology was developed. The main emphasis is to review and gain a deeper understanding of seminal developments in extreme flood hydrology, focusing on key ingredients that cause extreme floods and in estimating probabilities relevant for dam and levee safety. Twelve seminal papers provide the grounding to examine flood frequency estimation methods, the hydrology and hydraulics of extreme floods, the hydroclimatology of extreme floods and the core hydrologic measurements that lie at the center of flood hazards characterization. This training document provides overviews and summaries of the twelve papers that were studied as part of the course, a focused reading list to stimulate discussion on each paper, and copies of the twelve seminal papers. Each paper is representative of a major theme in extreme flood hydrology and central to flood hazard estimation. A comprehensive reading list provides critical references for each paper and the twelve selected themes.

Twelve Seminal Papers in Flood Hydrology for Dam and Levee Safety

Representative images from four seminal papers are shown below