Following three successful webinars in 2020, the ICFM continues the webinar series in 2021. This 4th webinar will focus on the global issues of ice-jam floods occurring during the winter and spring seasons. The 60-minute event will take place on Friday, February 5th, focusing on the impacts of ice jam processes on flood management.

Influenced by cold temperatures in winter and spring, 60 percent of the rivers in the world face the risks of flooding caused by various types of ice jams – mostly occurring in the Northern Hemisphere regions with high latitude, such as North America, North Europe, Russia, Canada, China, Japan, etc. Ice-jam floods pose threats to life and property in the communities located along these rivers as well as the habitats and ecosystems of the basins. For example, the Saint Johns River in Canada often experiences a chain of backwater flooding caused by ice jams from the upper to the lower streams. In China, every year, both the Yellow River and the Heilongjiang River experience ice-jam flood seasons lasting for several months. These locations  sometimes require extreme measures, like use of explosives to blow up the ice cover, in order to avoid the risk of flooding. The 2011 Tohoku tsunami in Japan resulted in a backflow of ice-jam floodwater, leading to a large scale dam failures and destruction of hydraulic structures.

Ice-jam floods constantly occur across the globe, and get even worse in face of the more frequent extreme weather caused by climate change. Flooding caused by ice-jams is the biggest challenge to river management in the winter. Therefore, conversation focusing on ice-jam processes and their link to flooding is  much-needed to secure better response.

Program

Webinar introduction

• Slobodan P. Simonovic, Water Resources Specialist, ICFM Chairperson, Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, Western University, Canada

Ice Jam Flood Mitigation Methods

• Tomasz Kolerski, River Ice Engineering Specialist, Vice Chair of IAHR Committee on Ice Research and Engineering, Poland

Progress and Trend in the Study of River Ice Hydraulics

• Guo Xinlei, Hydraulic Specialist, Member of IAHR Committee on Ice Research and Engineering, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR), China

Advances in the Development of Operational Ice-jam Flood Forecasting Systems

• Karl-Erich Lindenschmidt, Ph.D., P.Eng. Associate Professor, River Ice Engineering Specialist, University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Q & A session

 

 

Presentations can be accessed here:

• Prof. Karl Erich Lindenschmidt
• Prof. Guo Xinlei
• Prof. Tomasz Kolerski

 

Moderator: Zhang Cheng, Chairperson of the Permanent ICFM Secretariat, IWHR.  
Technical support: Medcon Conference Service Platform (MEDCON)

288 participants attended the webinar from all over the world. Thank you for your interest and we hope that you will join our future online events and conferences.