Atmospheric Circulation Patterns Associated with Extreme United States Floods Identified via Machine Learning

The massive socioeconomic impacts engendered by extreme floods provides a clear motivation for improved understanding of flood drivers. We use self-organizing maps, a type of artificial neural network, to perform unsupervised clustering of climate reanalysis data to identify synoptic-scale atmospheric circulation patterns associated with extreme floods across the United States. We subsequently assess the flood characteristics (e.g., frequency, spatial domain, event size, and seasonality) specific to each circulation pattern. To supplement this analysis, we have developed an interactive website with detailed information for every flood of record. We identify four primary categories of circulation patterns: tropical moisture exports, tropical cyclones, atmospheric lows or troughs, and melting snow. We find that large flood events are generally caused by tropical moisture exports (tropical cyclones) in the western and central (eastern) United States. We identify regions where extreme floods regularly occur outside the normal flood season (e.g., the Sierra Nevada Mountains due to tropical moisture exports) and regions where multiple extreme flood events can occur within a single year (e.g., the Atlantic seaboard due to tropical cyclones and atmospheric lows or troughs). These results provide the first machine-learning based near-continental scale identification of atmospheric circulation patterns associated with extreme floods with valuable insights for flood risk management.