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<br />001239 <br /> <br />2 <br /> <br />Research in the flood response has taken three main approaches: <br />1) Assemble in easy-to-retrieve form high quality records of <br />natural floods, causal rainfall, antecedent rainfall and <br />associated physical watershed parameters, <br />2) Development of a large scale model facility where rainfall- <br />runoff experiments could be carried out at will and where some <br />of the variables could be controlled, <br />3) Testing different analytical models and procedures for computing <br />the flood hydrograph from a small watershed. <br />The third step would utilize the data resources assembled in the first <br />two steps. The data assembled in Step One were data measured on small <br />pristine watersheds. Research by Van Sickle (1962) on urbanizing small <br />watersheds at Houston, Texas called attention to a progressive change in <br />the unit hydrographs derived from small watersheds in the Houston area. <br />Later Van Sickle expanded on his findings on small watersheds in a <br />contribution at a Water Resources Symposium, Moore and Morgan (1969). <br />These and other effects of urbanization were summarized by Schulz (1971). <br />As a result of these findings on urban watersheds, it was decided to <br />expand the CSU Flood Data File to include data from urbanized watersheds <br />in order to provide a data base from which to verify predictions made <br />about the effects of urbanizing watersheds. This project is currently <br />being implemented at CSU. <br /> <br />WATERSHED RESPONSE <br /> <br />The response of a small watershed to storm rainfall can be measured <br /> <br /> <br />in several ways. The unit hydrograph is a generalized way in which the <br /> <br /> <br />flood response can be defined. The unit hydrograph can be defined by <br />