Historical floods within the Selenga river basin: chronology and extreme events

Abstract

Large floods are among the most hazardous natural phenomena, which in many cases cause enormous losses to the economy and lead to human casualties. Along with the use of modern instrumental data, the analysis of historical information on large past floods is widely practiced in the world. This allows obtaining qualitative and quantitative characteristics of historical floods and significantly expanding the observation series. The Selenga River is one of the largest rivers of Central Asia with catchment area equal to 447,060 km2, and also it is rather flood-prone river. The hydrological regime of the Selenga River is quite well studied in the twentieth century on the basis of gauging stations data, but there is still a lack of knowledge about past floods. In this paper, we present a list of 26 known floods within the Selenga River basin from 1730 to 1900, compiled from available historical documents (newspapers, scientific reports, diaries, memoirs, etc.). We estimated peak water levels for three catastrophic floods (1830, 1869 and 1897), the historical maximum of which was 850 cm. The reliability of our estimates is confirmed by a comparative analysis of the large 1971 flood. It was revealed that the largest floods can cause a rise of the Lake Baikal water level up to 200 cm. The inflow to Lake Baikal resulting from the largest floods in the Selenga River basin is comparable to the average annual inflow of water into the lake. We can conclude that the use of historical data for the analysis of floods in Eastern Siberia is quite acceptable, but some limitations must be taken into account.