A warming climate is expected to have an impact on the magnitude and timing of river floods; however, no consistent large-scale climate change signal in observed flood magnitudes has been identified so far. We analyzed the timing of river floods in Europe over the past five decades, using a pan-European database from 4262 observational hydrometric stations, and found clear patterns of change in flood timing. Warmer temperatures have led to earlier spring snowmelt floods throughout northeastern Europe; delayed winter storms associated with polar warming have led to later winter floods around the North Sea and some sectors of the Mediterranean coast; and earlier soil moisture maxima have led to earlier winter floods in western Europe. Our results highlight the existence of a clear climate signal in flood observations at the continental scale.

Climate change has led to concerns about increasing river floods resulting from the greater water-holding capacity of a warmer atmosphere 1 . These concerns are reinforced by evidence of increasing economic losses associated with flooding in many parts of the world, including Europe 2 . Any changes in river floods would have lasting implications for the design of flood protection measures and flood risk zoning. However, existing studies have been unable to identify a consistent continental-scale climatic-change signal in flood discharge observations in Europe 3 , because of the limited spatial coverage and number of hydrometric stations. Here we demonstrate clear regional patterns of both increases and decreases in observed river flood discharges in the past five decades in Europe, which are manifestations of a changing climate. Our results-arising from the most complete database of European flooding so farsuggest that: increasing autumn and winter rainfall has resulted in increasing floods in northwestern Europe; decreasing precipitation and increasing evaporation have led to decreasing floods in medium and large catchments in southern Europe; and decreasing snow cover and snowmelt, resulting from warmer temperatures, have led to decreasing floods in eastern Europe. Regional flood discharge trends in Europe range from an increase of about 11 per cent per decade to a decrease of 23 per cent. Notwithstanding the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the observational record, the flood changes identified here are broadly consistent with climate model projections for the next century 4,5 , suggesting that climatedriven changes are already happening and supporting calls for the consideration of climate change in flood risk management.River floods are among the most costly natural hazards. Global annual average losses are estimated at US$104 billion 6 and are expected to increase with economic growth, urbanization and climatic change 2,7 . Physical arguments of increased heavy precipitation resulting from the enhanced water-holding capacity of a warmer atmosphere and

Abstract. The current work addresses one of the key building blocks towards an improved understanding of flood processes and associated changes in flood characteristics and regimes in Europe: the development of a comprehensive, extensive European flood database. The presented work results from ongoing cross-border research collaborations initiated with data collection and joint interpretation in mind. A detailed account of the current state, characteristics and spatial and temporal coverage of the European Flood Database, is presented.At this stage, the hydrological data collection is still growing and consists at this time of annual maximum and daily mean discharge series, from over 7000 hydrometric stations of various data series lengths. Moreover, the database currently comprises data from over 50 different data sources. The time series have been obtained from different national and regional data sources in a collaborative effort of a joint European flood research agreement based on the exchange of data, models and expertise, and from existing international data collections and open source websites. These ongoing efforts are contributing to advancing the understanding of regional flood processes beyond individual country boundaries and to a more coherent flood research in Europe.

This article describes the role of snow in the hydrological cycle in mountainous areas of central Europe (the Austrian Alps, Bohemian Massif, Western and Ukrainian Carpathians), presents a review of articles devoted to snow hydrology in the region and addresses the issues that seem to be focal areas of research in the near future. The last 60 years of snow hydrology research in central Europe, which was in many aspects comparable with research foci worldwide, provided a lot of knowledge on snow measurements, spatial and temporal distribution and modeling. However, despite continuous development of mathematical models and measurements of snow characteristics at meteorological stations and snow courses, current research seems to be mainly focused on testing new methods of obtaining snow cover data, e.g. using satellite images or terrestrial laser scanning. Combined application of snowmelt modeling, tracers and analyses of hydrological response of small catchments, especially during periods with diurnal runoff oscillations may extend knowledge on snow‐influenced runoff generation.

Floods are a periodic natural phenomenon, often accompanied by negative consequences for the local population and the economy as a whole. Therefore, knowledge of the trends of maximum flow have great practical importance, because it is the basis for planning and designing various hydraulic structures, hydrological forecasting, the mapping of flood risk, etc. In this paper, we analysed the long-term cyclical fluctuations of the maximum flow of snow-rain floods of the Danube basin within Ukraine (5 large rivers, 14 medium and 5 small). The database includes time series (34 gauging stations) of the maximum discharges of the cold period from the beginning of the observations up to 2015. The methodological approaches (developed by Gorbachova) are based on the use of hydro-genetic methods − namely the mass curve, the residual mass curve, and combined graphs. The presented results illustrate that the longterm fluctuations of the maximum flow of snow-rain floods are synchronous at all study gauging stations in the Danube basin within Ukraine, but these fluctuations are not always in the synchronous phase. We found that the maximum flow of snow-rain floods in the Danube basin within Ukraine have four types of long-term fluctuations, each with a different cycle duration.