2019 Missouri River Basin Historic Flood Event

Historic flooding and subsequent damage occurred along the Missouri River and its tributaries in March of 2019. The March 2019 event was characterized by frozen, wet antecedent moisture conditions preceding a rapid warm up with rain-on-snow precipitation. During the fall months of 2018, the lower Missouri River Basin experienced above average rainfall resulting in saturated soil conditions prior to the winter season, and extreme winter temperatures resulted in a deep frost within the nearly saturated soils. The “bomb cyclone” of the spring of 2019 produced a heavy rain event along with the melting of one to four inches of snow water equivalent (SWE) due to rapidly warming temperatures approaching 60 degrees Fahrenheit. In addition to the March 2019 events, heavy rains occurred further south in the basin in May 2019. The May events included record amounts of rainfall across the Kansas River Basin where 10 to 15 inches of widespread rainfall occurred. The extreme runoff and subsequent flooding resulted in the overtopping and failure of hundreds of miles of levee systems and billions of dollars of damage to federal levee systems. This paper will focus on the details of the weather events and the damage to federally sponsored levee systems in the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Omaha and Kansas City districts.