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was utilized. Each report used data outside its immediate region For basins smaller than the cell size, the flood frequencies in-
to determine their equations, but there was no real attempt to creased almost directly with area. Ogden and Dawdy showed that
coordinate the results. Could there be a universal equation cover- the difference from a direct relation was related to the actual path
ing the United States? How could the information in those reports of the storm and whether, in general, the storm hit directly over
be used other than to develop prediction equations region by re- the basin or the storm center was outside the basin. If every storm
gion? I collected all the reports as they came out, but I never were centered on a basin, seemingly, the flood frequencies should
managed to solve my self-defined puzzle. vary directly with area. Furey and Gupta 共2005兲 showed that tem-
Vijay Gupta was a student in some of my classes at Colorado poral varibility was the cause, which is similar to Ogden and
State University, and I influenced him to go to the University of Dawdy’s 共2003兲 empirical conclusion. Incidentally, the Walnut
Arizona to study under Chester Kisiel. I served on his M.S. thesis Gulch data exhibit simple scaling both before and after the break
and Ph.D. dissertation committees and have followed his career in the flood frequency relations.
through the years. Whenever I visited Vijay at Arizona or, later, at An important conclusion concerning understanding aiding in
the University of Mississippi and the University of Colorado, he prediction has to do with climate change as a result of global
filled me in on his work, which turned more to the understanding warming. By understanding how basins operate physically and
of the influence of basin morphology on the hydrology of the how the physics is connected to the spatial statistical variability in
basin. Finally one day when Vijay was explaining his thinking on floods, we may have a leg up on the influences of climate change
self-similarity of floods 共based in power laws or scaling兲 in joint and other impacts due to natural and human influences. Will glo-
collaboration with a mathematician, Ed Waymire 共Gupta and bal warming change the structure of rainfall intensity and dura-
Waymire 1990兲, I realized that this may be the solution to my tion? What will that change be? If not, there will continue to be a
puzzle. Perhaps the information latent in the USGS flood fre- break at about a quarter of a square mile in the Walnut Gulch
quency relations could be revealed through developing a scaling basin. As global warming changes the frequency of thunderstorms
theory. Those data could be used to test some of the scaling hy- or total precipitation, the return period of the floods at the break
potheses. The result was a series of papers showing a signature of point may change, but the basic structure of the flood frequency
power laws in the USGS flood frequency analyses and an attempt power law relations should remain intact. Similar conclusions
to give a crude physical interpretation to the scaling results may be reached elsewhere. Scaling properties are related to the
共Dawdy and Gupta 1992; Gupta et al. 1994; Gupta and Dawdy physics of the basin and should be invariant.
1995兲. However, it was soon realized that a physical understand- In conclusion, scaling theory at this time is leading to under-
ing of statistical scaling of floods, strictly applied, was valid only standing, a long-standing need in hydrology. It is contributing to
for nested basins, that is, basins with subbasins nested within, and the scientific understanding of hydrology. However, with global
time scales of individual rainfall-runoff events 共Gupta et al. warming introducing nonstationarity into hydrology, the tradi-
1996兲. Although the USGS regions contained similar basins, they tional tools of prediction will no longer be valid. They depend on
were not nested basins, and the time scale was annual not event- the future repeating the past. The future will not. Perhaps scaling
based. The observational evidence for power laws in quantile re- theory or other scientific explanations of hydrology can aid in
gression analysis of annual floods in nested basins for regional or hydrologic prediction in our present hydrologic universe, which is
spatial analysis of annual flood frequencies is a recent develop- becoming nonstationary. This would be a case where understand-
ment, because only two papers have been published on it: one for ing may, in fact, aid in prediction. Such theories may be necessary
the Walnut Gulch basin, Ariz. 共Goodrich et al. 1997兲 and another in our future hydrology.
for the Goodwin Creek basin, Miss. 共Ogden and Dawdy 2003兲.
The USDA has operated these two basins as experimental facili-
ties for many years, and they are quite unique as natural labora- References
tories in terms of high density of rainfall and streamflow data. The
Walnut Gulch basin is in the semiarid southwest United States, Dawdy, D. R. 共1995兲. “Hurst, scaling, and the meaning of hydrology.”
and the Goodwin Creek is in the humid southeast United States. Fourteenth Chester C. Kisiel Memorial Lecture, Univ. of Arizona,
Ogden and Dawdy 共2003兲 also conducted the first event-based Tucson, Ariz.
analysis of spatial flood statistics for the Goodwin Creek basin Dawdy, D. R., and Gupta, V. K. 共1992兲. “Regional flood frequency rela-
tions as evidence of scaling invariance.” Paper presented at Fall Con-
and observed a presence of power laws. Surprisingly, they found
ference of Amer. Geophys. Union, AGU, Washington, D.C.
that the power law parameters vary from one event to the next. Fiering, M. B. 共1964兲. “Multivariate techniques for synthetic hydrology.”
Following on this work, Furey and Gupta 共2005兲 have tested the J. Hydr. Div., 90共5兲, 43–60.
hypothesis that the observed variability in the power law param- Furey, P., and Gupta, V. 共2005兲. “Effects of excess rainfall on the tempo-
eters can be attributed to temporal variability in effective rainfall ral variability of peak-discharge power laws.” Adv. Water Resour., 28,
intensity and duration among events 1240–1253.