Afficher l'article

On the 12th and the 13th November 1999, the Aude region received amounts of rainfall that locally exceeded 500 mm. This extreme rainfall event resulted in one of the century's most significant floods in the Aude river catchment area and produced remarkable flash floods in some of its tributaries. Peak flood discharges from many upstream watersheds (area smaller than 100 km²) exceeded 10 m³/s/km². An extensive post-flood investigation was carried out in 2000 to collect information concerning the floods in seven of these upstream tributaries and to analyse the hydrological behaviour of the watersheds during this extreme rainfall event. As well as analysing the available rainfall data and estimating peak discharges on the basis of high water marks, information related to the timing of the floods, as provided by eyewitnesses, was gathered. A simple hydrological model, based on the SCS method and the kinematic …