Analysis of Flood Mechanisms in the Delaware River Basin in a Warming Climate

The dataset is used by a study focused on analyzing flood hazards in future climates and understanding the underlying mechanisms driving changes in floods across the Delaware River Basin. The dataset encompasses the following components:

1. Historical Flood events (AMF/hist/): flood events for each HUC8 basin of the Delaware River Basin from water year (WY) 1980 to 2018. The flood events were simulated using the Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model (DHSVM), a process-based hydrological model. Each flood event is defined as the annual maximum daily flow within the respective water year, which spans from October 1 through September 30. The dataset is organized into two columns, where the first column represents the year, and the second column represents the discharge in cubic meters per second.

2. Future flood events (AMF/GCMs/): DHSVM simulated flood events for each HUC8 basin of the Delaware River and each GCM for two distinct periods: the baseline period (WY 1970–1999) and the future period (WY 2070–2099). Future climates in the region are represented by 10 downscaled General Circulation Model (GCM) climate projections.The dataset is organized into two columns, where the first column represents the year, and the second column represents the discharge in cubic meters per second.

3. Hydrometeorological Variables (daily_states/): daily-scale continuous simulations of various hydrometeorological variables for historical climate (daily_states/hist) and under GCM scenarios (daily_states/GCMs). These data were used to analyze the generating mechanisms of each flood event within the HUC8 basins of the Delaware River Basin. The variables include soil moisture (SM), precipitation (PPT), snowfall, snow water equivalent (swq), and snowmelt (melt). These variables were derived from the simulation outputs of DHSVM and were aggregated from the grid cell levels to the HUC8 basin level by calculating daily averages over each basin.The files are stored in the .mat (Matlab data) format and consist of four dimensions, namely huc8 basins, GCMs, periods (baseline and future), and days. Specifically, the dimensions are 10x10x2x10957.