May 1999 Natural disasters often strike unexpectedly and bring people's lives into turmoil.
Floods are primarily due to heavy rainfalls persisting over a period of time.
They are often associated with severe weather conditions such as hurricanes and thunderstorms. Regardless, flooding remains a present and future threat. Knowledge of the stage and discharge relationship of the flood flow not only enhances the understanding necessary for engineering design of flood prevention structures, but also it is vital to estimate the flood flow extent. Based on this information, people in flood zones can evacuate in time to minimize the losses. In this thesis, a numerical method is employed to determine the flow depth and discharge relationship for turbulent flows over vegetated flood plains.