Approaches for the estimation of daily discharges at watercourse crossings of linear infrastructure

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Flood events can cause significant damages to linear engineering infrastructure, such as roads, railways or**pipelines, at locations of intersection of the infrastructure with the watercourse (river). It is hence important to**quantify the actual risks associated with these flood events for costly infrastructure. This requires the**availability of streamflow data at the locations of interest. Since these linear infrastructure can span over**thousands of kilometers, it is impossible to have hydrometric stations at all locations of intersection.**Hydrologists are hence often required to produce flood quantile estimates at ungauged crossings. The main goal**of the proposed ENGAGE research project is to develop approaches for the estimation of daily discharges at**ungauged watercourse crossings of linear infrastructure. A number of approaches will be developed and**adapted to the various conditions that may be encountered by BGC in North America (mountainous terrain,**Nordic region with ice effect, etc.). The main principle is to efficiently transfer Streamflows recorded at a**number of gauged locations to the ungauged site of interest. Adequate procedures will be developed to**delineate sets of gauged stations representing conditions that are similar to the target site. Then, appropriate**estimation techniques will be used to carry out the information transfer. Once a synthetic historical series is**generated at the target site, it is possible to carry out the appropriate flood frequency analysis procedure to**estimate flood quantiles corresponding to different return periods. The developed approaches can also be used**on a real-time basis to estimate instantaneous streamflows at the target location of interest. The developed**approaches will be grouped in a tool that can be easily used at any location in North America. The tool can**eventually be integrated in the River Network Tools (RNT) web-based application developed by our partner**BGC and which can be used for any location of intersection of watercourses with linear infrastructure.