Flood Risk in Central Europe

Becker, Alfred; Grünewald, Uwe

doi:10.1126/science.1083624

Cited by 108 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Despite the considerable rise in the number of reported major flood events and economic losses caused by floods in Europe over recent decades (see Section 7.3), no significant general climate-related trend in extreme high river flows that induce floods has yet been detected (Becker and Grunewald, 2003;Glaser and Stangl, 2003;Pinter et al, 2006;Hisdal et al, 2007;Macklin and Rumsby, 2007 , whereas globally there has probably been an increase in the frequency of extreme flood events in very large catchments (Milly et al, 2002). On the other hand, the frequency and severity of snowmelt and ice-jam floods in central Europe has decreased over recent decades because of the warming of European winters combined with less abundant snow cover (e.g.…”

Section: Past Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of Europe's changing climate – 2008 indicator based assessment

Jol¹,

Raes²,

Menne³

2009

IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci.

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Section: Past Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of Europe's changing climate – 2008 indicator based assessment

Jol¹,

Raes²,

Menne³

2009

IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci.

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“…If the flood data related to the US are presented in terms of damage per unit wealth, a slight and statistically insignificant downward trend is observed (Loucks and Stedinger 2007), which suggests that floods might have a lessening or neutral impact on the overall personal wealth of citizens in the US over the course of the past decades. Some other studies have focused on regions with similar economic susceptibility than the US, such as Canada (Etkin et al 2003) and Europe (Becker and Grünewald 2003;Mudelsee et al 2003;Barredo 2007). Since floods were a substantial hazard in Europe over the past centuries some inventories exist on the temporal distribution of such events.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mountain hazards: reducing vulnerability by adapted building design

Holub¹,

Suda

Fuchs

2011

Environ Earth Sci

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Despite the long tradition of technical mitigation on a catchment scale in European mountain regions, losses due to mountain hazards are still considerably high in number and monetary loss. Therefore, the concept of technical mitigation had been supplemented by land-use planning and, more recently, local structural protection. Local structural protection includes measures directly implemented at or adjacent to endangered objects, and has proven to be particularly cost-effective with respect to integral risk management strategies. However, the effect of local structural protection in reducing the vulnerability of elements at risk, and the associated consequences with respect to a reduction of structural vulnerability have not been quantified so far. Moreover, there is a particular gap in quantifying the expenditures necessary for local structural protection measures. Therefore, a prototype of residential building adapted to mountain hazards is presented in this study. This prototype is equipped with various constructional elements to resist the incurring impact forces, i.e., of fluvial sediment transport and of snow avalanches. According to possible design loads emerging from these hazard processes, the constructive design necessary is presented, and the amount of additional costs required for such an adaptation is presented. By comparing these costs with quantitative loss data it is shown that adapted building design is particularly effective to reduce the consequences of low-magnitude, high-frequency events in mountain regions.

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“…This unprecedented event is part of a recent set of extreme flood events over the last decade caused by record-breaking precipitation amounts across central Europe (Becker and Grünewald, 2003), the UK (Slingo et al, 2014), Pakistan (Webster et al, 2011), Australia (Ven den Honert and McAneney, 2011), the northeastern USA (WMO, 2011), Japan (WMO, 2011) and Korea (WMO, 2011). In all cases, the immediate action of governments through the implementation of emergency and action plans was required.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Propagation of hydro-meteorological uncertainty in a model cascade framework to inundation prediction

Rodríguez-Rincón

Acuña²,

Breña-Naranjo

2015

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. This investigation aims to study the propagation of meteorological uncertainty within a cascade modelling approach to flood prediction. The methodology was comprised of a numerical weather prediction (NWP) model, a distributed rainfall-runoff model and a 2-D hydrodynamic model. The uncertainty evaluation was carried out at the meteorological and hydrological levels of the model chain, which enabled the investigation of how errors that originated in the rainfall prediction interact at a catchment level and propagate to an estimated inundation area and depth. For this, a hindcast scenario is utilised removing non-behavioural ensemble members at each stage, based on the fit with observed data. At the hydrodynamic level, an uncertainty assessment was not incorporated; instead, the model was setup following guidelines for the best possible representation of the case study. The selected extreme event corresponds to a flood that took place in the southeast of Mexico during November 2009, for which field data (e.g. rain gauges; discharge) and satellite imagery were available. Uncertainty in the meteorological model was estimated by means of a multiphysics ensemble technique, which is designed to represent errors from our limited knowledge of the processes generating precipitation. In the hydrological model, a multi-response validation was implemented through the definition of six sets of plausible parameters from past flood events. Precipitation fields from the meteorological model were employed as input in a distributed hydrological model, and resulting flood hydrographs were used as forcing conditions in the 2-D hydrodynamic model. The evolution of skill within the model cascade shows a complex aggregation of errors between models, suggesting that in valley-filling events hydro-meteorological uncertainty has a larger effect on inundation depths than that observed in estimated flood inundation extents.

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Flood Risk in Central Europe

Cited by 108 publications

References 3 publications

Impacts of Europe's changing climate – 2008 indicator based assessment

Impacts of Europe's changing climate – 2008 indicator based assessment

Mountain hazards: reducing vulnerability by adapted building design

Propagation of hydro-meteorological uncertainty in a model cascade framework to inundation prediction

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