Documenting the Stages and Streamflows Associated With the 2011 Activation of the New Madrid Floodway, Missouri. Chapter E of 2011 Floods of the Central United States

摘要

USGS teams began making daily discrete observations of streamflow of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers on April 28, 2011, at strategic locations upstream, downstream, and adjacent to the floodway. These measurements and ancillary data supported both the USACE flood fight efforts and the National Weather Service (NWS) river forecasting efforts. NWS forecasts of the flood magnitude and timing were crucial as the upstream flood waves coursing down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers simultaneously arrived at the confluence area near Cairo, Ill. Given the unique opportunity to collect detailed data of the floodplains hydraulic response to a levee breach, the USGS obtained access to the floodway from the State of Missouri and instrumented the floodway with autonomous submersible pressure transducers (SPTs), similar to the SPT shown in figure 3, in the event of floodway activation. On the evening of April 28, 2011, a USGS team deployed the first of 38 spatially distributed SPTs (fig. 4), each with the ability to collect a time series of water level data. The team finished deploying the last of these SPTs less than 24 hours later. The purpose of this report is to present the data collected by the USGS in cooperation with the USACE in and near the floodway from April 28, 2011 to June 14, 2011. Methods used to collect and process these data also are presented.