“Prophetic vision, vivid imagination”: The 1927 Mississippi River flood

Journal Article · 29 November 2015 · Water Resources Research

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/2015wr017927 · OSTI ID:1565405

Smith, James A. ^[1]; Baeck, Mary Lynn ^[1]

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1. Princeton Univ., NJ (United States). Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The 1927 flood in the Lower Mississippi River was the most destructive flood in American history, inundating more than 70,000 km² of land, resulting in approximately 500 fatalities and leaving more than 700,000 people homeless. Despite the prominence of the 1927 flood, details on the flood, and the storms that produced the flood, are sparse. We examine the hydrometeorology and hydroclimatology of the 1927 flood in the Lower Mississippi River through downscaling simulations of the storms that were responsible for catastrophic flooding and through empirical analyses of rainfall and streamflow records. We use Twentieth Century Reanalysis fields as boundary conditions and initial conditions for downscaling simulations using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. We place the hydrometeorological analyses of the 1927 storms in a hydroclimatological context through analyses of the Twentieth Century Reanalysis fields. Analyses are designed to assess the physical processes that control the upper tail of flooding in the Lower Mississippi River. We compare the 1927 flood in the Lower Mississippi River to floods in 1937 and 2011 that represent the most extreme flooding in the Lower Mississippi River.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
• Sponsoring Organization: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• OSTI ID: 1565405
• Journal Information: Water Resources Research, Journal Name: Water Resources Research Journal Issue: 12 Vol. 51; ISSN 0043-1397
• Publisher: American Geophysical Union (AGU)Copyright Statement
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English