U.S.
GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
Open-File Report 02-260
Fifty-Year Flood-Inundation Maps for Sonaguera, Honduras
By D.L. Kresch, M.C. Mastin, and T.D. Olsen
ABSTRACT
After the devastating floods caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, maps of the areas and depths of the 50-year-flood inundation at 15 municipalities in Honduras were prepared as a tool for agencies involved in reconstruction and planning. This report, which is one in a series of 15, presents maps of areas in the municipality of Sonaguera that would be inundated by a 50-year flood of Río Sonaguera and its tributary, Río Juan Lázaro. Geographic Information System (GIS) coverages of the flood inundation are available on a computer in the municipality of Sonaguera as part of the Municipal GIS project and on the Internet at the Flood Hazard Mapping Web page (http://mitchnts1.cr.usgs.gov/projects/floodhazard.html). These coverages allow users to view the flood inundation in much more detail than is possible using the maps in this report.
Water-surface elevations for an estimated 50-year-flood on Río Sonaguera and Río Juan Lázaro at Sonaguera were determined using HEC-RAS, a one-dimensional, steady-flow, step-backwater computer program. The channel and floodplain cross sections used in HEC-RAS were developed from an airborne light-detection-and-ranging (LIDAR) topographic survey of the area and a ground survey at the bridge. There are no nearby long-term stream-gaging stations on Río Sonaguera or Río Juan Lázaro; therefore, the 50-year-flood discharge for Río Sonaguera above the confluence with Río Juan Lázaro, 194 cubic meters per second; for Río Juan Lázaro at its mouth, 168 cubic meters per second, and for Río Sonaguera at the downstream end of the study area, 282 cubic meters per second; were estimated using a regression equation that relates the 50-year-flood discharge to drainage area and mean annual precipitation.
Abstract
Introduction
Description of Study Area
Fifty-Year Flood Discharge
Water-Surface Profiles of the 50-Year Flood
Fifty-Year Flood-Inundation Maps
Data Availability
References Cited
This report and associated figures are available online in Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have the Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader, it is available for free download from Adobe Systems Incorporated.
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Geographic Information System coverages of flood inundation and flood depth are available at
http://mitchnts1.cr.usgs.gov/projects/floodhazard.html
Document Accessibility: Adobe Systems Incorporated has information about PDFs and the visually impaired. This information provides tools to help make PDF files accessible. These tools convert Adobe PDF documents into HTML or ASCII text, which then can be read by a number of common screen-reading programs that synthesize text as audible speech. In addition, an accessible version of Acrobat Reader 5.0 for Windows (English only), which contains support for screen readers, is available. These tools and the accessible reader may be obtained free from Adobe at Adobe Access.
Send questions or comments about this report to the author, David L. Kresch (dlkresch@usgs.gov) 253.428.3600 ext. 2683.
For more information about USGS activities in Washington, visit the USGS Washington District home page.
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