Abstract. This paper contains a preliminary analysis of flood risk in Mediterranean countries, conducted within the framework of the FLASH European Project. All flood events recorded between 1990 and 2006 in the Mediterranean region have been included in the study. Results of previous international projects (STORM, SPHERE, AMPHORE, RI-NAMED and MEDEX), as well as information provided by FLASH Project partners and data included in scientific papers were the main source used in building this database. All the above information had been dispersed in various places, and an attempt was made here to create, for the first time, a verified and complete single database for the entire Mediterranean region. The work analyses the spatial and temporal distribution of flood events, as well as their social impact, with special attention to certain case studies that have been analysed in detail.
[1] A statistical verification of satellite precipitation estimates has been conducted for a one year period over the Central and Eastern Mediterranean. The NASA realtime Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (MPA-RT) data are verified against 73 raingauge data. The verification aims to assess the skill of these satellite estimates to detect rainy areas and to give information on the accumulated precipitation errors. The results show almost unbiased results for the low and medium precipitation thresholds, especially during the wet period of the year. At higher accumulation thresholds, the satellite data overestimate the rain events compared to the raingauges, especially during the dry period of the year, when the major part of precipitation is produced by isolated thunderstorms. Moreover the analysis showed that for the high precipitation amounts and during the whole period the probability of detection is quite low and the false alarm ratio is high (reaching $85% during the dry period).
A study of a daily precipitation database for the island of Cyprus is performed for a period of 30 years. A number of climatic indices for precipitation are calculated using the recently available CHIRPS dataset, on high spatial (0.05°) and temporal (daily) resolution. The same parameters for the same time period are then calculated using the dense network of rain gauges of the Cyprus Department of Meteorology. The results show a quite promising performance regarding indices related to daily precipitation thresholds, resulting in high correlation scores. In the case of indices referring to number of days, it seems that the results are ambiguous, with medium or no correlation, probably related to the criteria used for the identification of a wet (rainy) day on the CHIRPS dataset.
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