Introduction

The purpose of this book is to introduce a new ice-jam flood forecasting methodology and to equip the reader with a basic understanding of river ice processes, which is required to implement such an approach. The method is based on a stochastic modelling framework, which reflects the chaotic nature of river ice jams and their subsequent flooding potential. Small shifts in the hydraulic and ice regimes of a jam can cause very different outcomes in terms of the condition of the ice jam and the state of flooding. However, order can be found in chaotic systems (Prigogine and Stengers in Order out of chaos—man’s new dialogue with nature, Bantam Books, 1984) and, through the stochastic modelling framework, frequency distributions of the ensemble of backwater levels from multiple model simulations are able to place the flooding potential in a probabilistic context.