Coping with hydrological extremes, floods, and droughts has been a major concern since the dawn of human civilization. Freshwater, a necessary condition of life and a raw material used in very high volumes in virtually every human activity, is becoming increasingly scarce. Water use has risen considerably in the last hundred years at a pace exceeding the population growth. Therefore, societies are increasingly vulnerable to droughts and water deficits. Although the 21st century is heralded as the age of water scarcity, flood losses continue to grow. Increasing global vulnerability results to a large extent from soaring anthropopressure: settlements in hazardous locations and adverse land use changes. Deforestation and urbanization lead to reduction of the storage volume and higher values of runoff coefficient. In more wealthy countries, it is the material flood losses that continue to grow, while the number of fatalities goes down. Advanced flood preparedness systems can save lives and reduce human suffering. In some regions of the world, long-term forecasts (e.g., ENSO) help improve the preparedness for hydrological extremes, both floods and droughts, and hopefully will even more so in the future. Scenarios for future climate indicate the possibility of sharpening the extremes and changes of their seasonality. For instance, in Western Scotland and Norway, an increase of winter floods has already been observed. According to recent assessments, there is a growing risk of summer droughts in the Mediterranean region: less precipitation in summer and higher temperature will coincide, causing higher evapotranspiration and less runoff. Fighting with floods and droughts has not been quite successful. Humans have to get used to the fact that extreme hydrological events are natural phenomena that will continue to occur. While doing ones best to improve the preparedness systems, it is necessary to learn to live with hydrological extremes.

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This article examines the role of climatic and hydrological variability in assessing the cumulative risk of flood events in Poland over a T-year period. In a broad sense flood-risk estimation combines a frequency analysis of extreme hydrological phenomena with an evaluation of flood-induced damages. The damage from floods depends on the critical values of the river discharges. The probabilistic flood analysis usually includes an estimation of the expected annual probability of the critical discharge Qcr being exceeded and the equivalent long-term risk of it being exceeded over the next T years. If, however, the process is nonstationary, the T-year risk of flood damage may depend importantly on the variation of hydrological processes. As a possible explanation for the variations observed in snowmelt-induced floods in Polish rivers, this article investigates the possible impact of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) on surface air temperature T and precipitation P. The spatial distribution of the correlation coefficients between NAO and T, as well as NAO and P, show very significant differences in the NAO impact on meteorological variables in various parts of Europe. To assess the implications of NAO variations on spring flood discharges, a simple model of Snow Cover Water Equivalent (SCWE) was applied to selected Polish river catchments. The conclusion of this analysis is that the yearly maximum of SCWE values significantly decreases with increasing NAO. This leads to a temporal redistribution of winter and spring runoff. The question of spring flood characteristics being stationary or nonstationary may therefore be linked with stochastic properties of the NAO index time series.