Insights into Expected Changes in Regulated Flood Frequencies due to the Spatial Configuration of Flood Retention Ponds
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 20, Issue 10
Abstract
This study examines the effects that the spatial configuration of flood retention ponds have on the reduction of flood peaks across different spatial scales in the catchment. A continuous simulation approach is used to investigate how different spatial organizations, storage capacities, and release capacities of retention ponds alter the downstream flood frequency curve. The simulation experiment involves a small () hypothetical catchment, a 1,000 year-long randomly generated rainfall time series and a distributed rainfall-runoff model that simulates the transport of water along the drainage network. Moreover, a hypothetical order four Mandelbrot-Viseck tree is used as a generic template of river network branching. Three important insights emerge from this study’s theoretical exercise. First, flood retention ponds that are placed in the upstream section of the catchment and that are configured in parallel offer better flood control than either ponds that are configured in series along the main stem or a single, bigger pond that is located near the catchment outlet. Second, for ponds that are configured in series and have different flood release or storage capacities, the maximum reduction of peak discharges of low exceedance probability at the catchment outlet is achieved when the upstream pond is emptied first or has a larger storage capacity than the downstream pond. Third, the effect that retention ponds have on flood frequency diminishes in the downstream direction as the proportion of unregulated subcatchments that contribute to the peak discharge at the outlet also increases. This means that the flood mitigation benefits of flood retention ponds are primarily local, which underscores the added value of distributed flood retention ponds in terms of their ability to disperse the flood control benefits across the catchment.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Iowa Flood Center (IFC) at University of Iowa for financially supporting this work. The authors would also like to thank the editor and the three anonymous referees whose thoughtful reviews have helped us to significantly improve on the original manuscript.
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 20 • Issue 10 • October 2015
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 6, 2014
Accepted: Dec 11, 2014
Published online: Jan 27, 2015
Discussion open until: Jun 27, 2015
Published in print: Oct 1, 2015
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