Brief communication: Towards defining the worst-case breach scenarios and potential flood volumes for moraine-dammed lake outbursts

Abstract

Moraine dam failures are the main source of catastrophic glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). The effective GLOF disaster risk management requires reliable identification of areas at risk. While predictive outburst flood modelling benefits from advancing tools and computational capacities, some of the fundamental considerations remain poorly addressed. Among them, the outburst flood scenarios are essential yet often oversimplified input for modelling. Here we present novel methodology which enables the estimation of a maximum breach depth and so the calculation of potential flood volume (PFV) in geotechnical data-scarce regions, with the key parameter being the slope of the breached channel (alpha) derived from past events.