Floods and storm types in the United States: peak-over-threshold flood events, storm types, and antecedent conditions

Authors: Manuela Brunner and Erin Dougherty
Owners: Manuela Brunner
Last update: 20.01.2022

This dataset provides local and regional flood events for 671 catchments in the United States, part of the CAMELS dataset. 
In addition, it provides time series of storm type and antecedent conditions classes for 9 hydro-climatic regions in the United States for the period 1995-2017.
The dataset accompanies the study by Brunner and Dougherty 2022 (Water Resources Research): Varying importance of storm types and antecedent conditions for local and regional floods

Dataset components:

(1) Shapefile of 671 CAMELS catchments (Addor et al. 2017) including Bukovsky region membership: CAMELS_catchments_Bukovsky_regions.shp
hur_id: USGS station ID
AREA: catchment area (m^2)
elev_mean: mean catchment elevation (m.a.s.l.)
region: Bukovsky region number: 1: Pacific Northwest, 2: California, 3: Rocky Mountains, 4: Desert, 5: Great Plains, 6: Prairie, 7: South, 8: Great Lakes, 9: East
bukovsky_region_name: name of Bukovsky region
(2) Shapefile of 9 Bukovsky regions (Bukovsky 2011): Bukovsky_regions.shp
Name: name of Bukovsky region also used in (1).
(3) Local flood events identified using a peak-over-threshold approach with a threshold set to the 25th percentile of the annual maxima time series.
Filenames: _POT_events_am_based_0.25.txt, hru_id from (1)
Date: time of peak discharge (YYYY-MM-DD)
start: start of flood event (YYYY-MM-DD)
end: end of flood event (YYYY-MM-DD)
duration: event duration (days)
volume: excess volume (Mio m3/event)
magnitude: peak discharge (m3/s)
(4) Regional flood events per Bukovsky region: 
Filenames: _regional_flood_events.txt, Name from (2)
Each file contains a list of flood events that affected at least one gauge in the region.
For each flood event (YYYY-MM-DD) and catchment (hru_id from (1)), the affected catchments are indicated by the date of occurrence in that specific catchments. NA'S indicate non-affectedness.
(5) Storm types time series for period 1995-2017 per Bukovsky region: storm_types_per_bukovsky_region.txt
region: Bukovsky region (from (2)).
date: Date (YYYY-MM-DD)
storm_type: Storm type class (see Brunner and Dougherty 2022)
(6) Antecedent conditions time series for period 1981-2019 per Bukovsky region:
Filenames: _ant_conditions.txt (region numbers from 2)
Date: Date (YYYY-MM-DD)
ant_cond: Antecedent conditions class (see Brunner and Dougherty 2022).


Related publications: 
Brunner, M. I., & Dougherty, E. M. (2022). Varying importance of storm types and antecedent conditions for local and regional floods. Water Resources Research, 58, e2022WR033249. 
Addor, N., Newman, A. J., Mizukami, N., & Clark, M. P. (2017). The CAMELS data set: Catchment attributes and meteorology for large-sample studies. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 21 (10), 5293-5313. doi: 10.5194/hess-21-5293-2017
Bukovsky, M. S. (2011). Masks for the Bukovsky regionalization of North America. Boulder CO: Regional Integrated Sciences Collective, Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences, National Center for Atmospheric Research. Retrieved from http://www.narccap.ucar.edu/contrib/bukovsky/