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Ten Largest Annual Instantaneous Floods and Seasonal Signal for Reference Streamgages in the United States, Water Years 1966-2015

Metadata Updated: October 29, 2025

These data describe the 10-largest annual, instantaneous flood peaks and corresponding dates of those largest floods for 473 streamgages in the Hydro-Climatic Data Network (HCDN) HCDN-2009 (Lins, 2012) network; they are also the data and results used in the companion manuscript by Collins, M.J, Hodgkins, G.A., Archfield, S.A., and Hirsch, R.M, under review, "The occurrence of large floods in the United States in the modern hydroclimate regime: seasonality, trends, and large-scale climate associations," and submitted to Water Resources Research. The HCDN-2009 (Lins, 2012) network is a subset of streamgages classified as unimpaired to the extent possible that any upstream regulation or urbanization could be evaluated. From this network, the set of streamgages was further narrowed based on their completeness of record and according to the criteria used in Hodgkins et al. (2019) and Dudley et al (2018), which requires that each decade of annual flood peaks have at least 8 observations or 80 percent completeness in each decade. Of the 473 streamgages, 386 streamgages overlapped with those streamgages classified by McCabe and Wolock (2014) into 14 geographically-coherent clusters that correspond to climatic and physiographic regions across the country and are noted in the dataset. These clusters were used to determine months with flood-rich or flood-poor months, also reported in the data release. For those streamgages not included in McCabe and Wolock (2014), streamgages were assigned to one of the 14 classes by applying the methods outlined in their paper. The metadata includes an attribute column to denote which streamgages fall into this category and which streamgages were included in McCabe and Wolock (2014).

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date September 12, 2025
Metadata Updated Date October 29, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI USGS DCAT-US

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date September 12, 2025
Metadata Updated Date October 29, 2025
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
Identifier http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/usgs-60675f7ad34edc0435c09cda
Data Last Modified 2022-01-19T00:00:00Z
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://ddi.doi.gov/usgs-data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 556e4b2d-ea23-47c7-8921-632d3dc157a8
Harvest Source Id 2b80d118-ab3a-48ba-bd93-996bbacefac2
Harvest Source Title DOI USGS DCAT-US
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -127.52929686992, 23.563987127563, -65.478515622399, 49.951219907176
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 4f0cb32d495f1e9dc7f9d4eaaf27f7ea66d4c8b85cd38ccfc87a578e082d147b
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -127.52929686992, 23.563987127563, -127.52929686992, 49.951219907176, -65.478515622399, 49.951219907176, -65.478515622399, 23.563987127563, -127.52929686992, 23.563987127563}

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