As news spread of the devastating and deadly flooding west of Austin, Tex., last weekend (followed by so much more), I started exploring what’s known about flood risks along the Blanco River and other waterways in Texas’s “Flash Flood Alley.” I came across a 2007 modeling study by Joanna C. Curran, a hydrologist then moving from Texas State University to the University of Virginia, assessing how urbanization in the Blanco River watershed would affect the river flows under various scenarios for growth.

The paper, published in the Texas Journal of Science, is titled “Modeling future flows in the Blanco River watershed under various development and rainfall scenarios” and can be found online here. I posted Curran’s helpful presentation on the Blanco River research on Slideshare.

The research focus was more on drought risk than flash floods, but in developing the model of the river and surrounding basin, Curran developed an intimate sense of the dynamics of the system… Read the full article  from the NY Times Dot Earth blog