Watershed Modeling of Various Flood Damage Reduction Strategies - Technical Paper No. 6

Temporarily storing runoff from spring snowmelt and summer storms is one of the key strategies to achieving flood damage reduction within the Red River basin. However, there has been no consensus as to the most feasible, practical and environmentally friendly means to achieve a significant amount of flood storage. The Red River Mediation Working Group requested the Technical and Scientific Advisory Committee (TSAC) to select an actual watershed and to identify and test various flood damage reduction strategies. One of the primary issues is the extent to which a strategy to "store water where it falls" achieves local flood reduction benefits as well as main stem benefits. This exercise looked at hydrologic impacts of localized storage, land use changes, and on-and off-channel impoundments. TI-us effort was strictly a hydrology study; there was no attempt to assess the feasibility of actually implementing any particular strategy, or quantify other benefits or adverse impacts.