Virtually no state in the union has the challenges of flooding that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania does.  The following synopsis discusses the results for each county within   the state of Pennsylvania regarding all flood events from 1950-2000.

Topography of Pennsylvania

Table 1:  The Number of Flood Events Per County

The following image displays how many times individual counties have been affected by floods.

    This second table is a tabulation of the archived flood events that were documented for various times, with no real consistency.  To account for this, I documented each reported time and then summed the events according to where they fell within their reporting hour.  Thus, this table is broken down into half hours and had the number of recorded flood events that fall within to its right.  The time of day with the highest number of recorded flood events is 19:00:00 (7:00pm) with 115 flood events; the time of day with the lowest is 3:30:00 (3:30am).  Therefore, the time of day most prone to flood events is early evening, and the time of day least prone to flooding is early morning.

Table 2: This table represents the time of day that is most prone to flood events

 

PA Flood Frequency by the Half Hour
0:00:00	56
0:30:00	31
1:00:00	47
1:30:00	22
2:00:00	48
2:30:00	16
3:00:00	34
3:30:00	8
4:00:00	60
4:30:00	17
5:00:00	33
5:30:00	16
6:00:00	50
6:30:00	15
7:00:00	38
7:30:00	29
8:00:00	66
8:30:00	15
9:00:00	59
9:30:00	20
10:00:00	63
10:30:00	24
11:00:00	36
11:30:00	24
12:00:00	43
12:30:00	26
13:00:00	78
13:30:00	40
14:00:00	73
14:30:00	63
15:00:00	92
15:30:00	51
16:00:00	99
16:30:00	57
17:00:00	89
17:30:00	66
18:00:00	83
18:30:00	48
19:00:00	115
19:30:00	60
20:00:00	91
20:30:00	51
21:00:00	55
21:30:00	21
22:00:00	67
22:30:00	24
23:00:00	40
23:30:00	25

* It should also be noted, that these numbers are based only upon those provided in the archived files.  Despite research, there were a significant number of flood events that did not have time of day recorded.

    This third table is based upon data provided in Table 2.  Within this table, the day is broken down into early morning, morning, afternoon and evening time periods; these times were based upon the general classification of times within the general public.  The time of day that has had the highest number of flood events is evening, with 603 total flood events. 

Table 3: This table represents the time of day that witnesses the most flood events

     This fourth table represents the time of year which is most prone to flooding within Pennsylvania. This table was created by simply adding the number of recorded events that occurred during each month, (more so by analyzing the date of a specific flood event). The month of June has the highest number of flood events with 186, though July and August have only a few less.  This can be confirmed by the fact that these months fall within the time of year where Pennsylvania receives its highest amounts of rainfall.  It should be noted, however, that the numbers are not exact representations as the flood events were originally recoded by county and more than one county can experience the same flood event at one particular time.  Therefore, duplicate flood events for one particular day were recorded as a single flood event.

Table 4: This table represents the time of year which is most prone to flood event occurrence in Pennsylvania

 Table 5:  This table consists of the county populations

   This sixth table is the number of floods per person per county.  These numbers were reached by dividing the number of flood events for a particular county by that county’s population.  To keep the data uniform, three places after the decimal were used, which required rounding in some cases.  Philadelphia had the lowest number of flood events per person and Forest County had the highest number of flood events per person. It should be noted that Philadelphia County also has the largest county population while Forest also has the lowest county population.

Table 6:  This table is the number of flood events per person per county.

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