Historical hydrology for studying flood risk in Europe

Brázdil, Rudolf; Kundzewicz, Zbigniew W.; Benito, Gerardo

doi:10.1623/hysj.51.5.739

Cited by 266 publications

(177 citation statements)

References 58 publications

(54 reference statements)

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“…The primary goal of historical hydrology is to collect information on past extreme floods such as date, relative magnitude, damages and socio-economic impacts at the time (Brázdil et al, 2006b(Brázdil et al, , 2012Glaser et al, 2010). Most recently, there has been a growing interest in quantifying these descriptive data in the reconstruction of flow depths, discharges and hydraulic properties associated with historical flooding (Fig.…”

Section: Quantitative Historical Hydrologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several review papers have described the main data sources of historical hydrology (Brázdil et al, 2006b(Brázdil et al, , 2012. They are often grouped into three data categories: handwritten documents (e.g.…”

Section: Documentary Data Sources and Typesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…narrative sources, administrative and ecclesiastical reports, and personal correspondence); printed sources (special print newspapers, reports and technical papers); iconographic sources (stone marks, historical photographs and paintings, old cartography and cross sections). Narrative descriptions about floods may be biased by perception, both from the writer and from the present-day researcher (Brázdil et al, 2006b). Since information from documentary sources is mainly qualitative, several classifications have been suggested taking into account the severity of flood impacts (Sturm et al, 2001).…”

Section: Documentary Data Sources and Typesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Historical hydrology is the study of the hydrological cycle before the continuous instrumental recordings on the basis of highly resolved man-made documentary evidence (Brázdil et al, 2006b(Brázdil et al, , 2012. Most of the documented pre-instrumental records refer to hydrological extremes (floods and droughts) that produced major disruption in past societies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most of the documented pre-instrumental records refer to hydrological extremes (floods and droughts) that produced major disruption in past societies. In this context, historical floods have been frequently reported through written, pictorial and epigraphic documentation across Europe (Brázdil et al, 2006b(Brázdil et al, , 2012Herget, 2012). Historical hydrology is on the interface between hydrology and environmental history.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantitative historical hydrology in Europe

Benito

Brázdil

Herget

et al. 2015

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. In recent decades, the quantification of flood hydrological characteristics (peak discharge, hydrograph shape, and runoff volume) from documentary evidence has gained scientific recognition as a method to lengthen flood records of rare and extreme events. This paper describes the methodological evolution of quantitative historical hydrology under the influence of developments in hydraulics and statistics. In the 19th century, discharge calculations based on flood marks were the only source of hydrological data for engineering design, but were later left aside in favour of systematic gauge records and conventional hydrological procedures. In the last two decades, there has been growing scientific and public interest in understanding long-term patterns of rare floods, in maintaining the flood heritage and memory of extremes, and developing methods for deterministic and statistical application to different scientific and engineering problems. A compilation of 46 case studies across Europe with reconstructed discharges demonstrates that (1) in most cases present flood magnitudes are not unusual within the context of the last millennium, although recent floods may exceed past floods in some temperate European rivers (e.g. the Vltava and Po rivers); (2) the frequency of extreme floods has decreased since the 1950s, although some rivers (e.g. the Gardon and Ouse rivers) show a reactivation of rare events over the last two decades. There is a great potential for gaining understanding of individual extreme events based on a combined multiproxy approach (palaeoflood and documentary records) providing high-resolution time flood series and their environmental and climatic changes; and for developing non-systematic and non-stationary statistical models based on relations of past floods with external and internal covariates under natural low-frequency climate variability.

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Section: Quantitative Historical Hydrologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Documentary Data Sources and Typesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Documentary Data Sources and Typesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantitative historical hydrology in Europe

Benito

Brázdil

Herget

et al. 2015

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Modeling flood dynamics along the superelevated channel belt of the Yellow River over the last 3000 years

et al. 2015

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The Yellow River, China, experienced >1000 levee breaches during the last 3000 years. A reduced-complexity model is developed in this study to explore the effects of climate change and human activity on flood levels, levee breaches, and river avulsions. The model integrates yearly morphological change along a channel belt with daily river fluxes and hourly evolution of levee breaches. Model sensitivity analysis reveals that under natural conditions, superelevation of the channel belt dominates flood frequency. When there is significant human-accelerated basin erosion and breach repair, the dominant factors shift to a combination of mean annual precipitation, superelevation, critical shear stress of weak channel banks, and the time interval between breach initiation and its repair. The effect of precipitation on flood frequency is amplified by land use changes in the hinterland, particularly in the erodible Loess Plateau. Uncertainty analysis estimates the most likely values of the dominant factors for six historical periods between 850 B.C. and A.D. 1839, which are used to quantitatively reconstruct flood dynamics. During 850 B.C. to A.D. 1839, when the sediment load increased fourfold, the breach recurrence interval was shortened from more than 500 years to less than 6 years, and the breach outflow rate increased~27 times. River management practices during A.D. 1579 to A.D. 1839 focused on levees and triggered a severe positive feedback of increased levee heights and flood hazard exacerbation. Raising the levee heights proved to be ineffective for sustainable flood management.

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A fuzzy Bayesian approach to flood frequency estimation with imprecise historical information

Salinas

Kiss²,

Viglione³

et al. 2016

Water Resources Research

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This paper presents a novel framework that links imprecision (through a fuzzy approach) and stochastic uncertainty (through a Bayesian approach) in estimating flood probabilities from historical flood information and systematic flood discharge data. The method exploits the linguistic characteristics of historical source material to construct membership functions, which may be wider or narrower, depending on the vagueness of the statements. The membership functions are either included in the prior distribution or the likelihood function to obtain a fuzzy version of the flood frequency curve. The viability of the approach is demonstrated by three case studies that differ in terms of their hydromorphological conditions (from an Alpine river with bedrock profile to a flat lowland river with extensive flood plains) and historical source material (including narratives, town and county meeting protocols, flood marks and damage accounts). The case studies are presented in order of increasing fuzziness (the Rhine at Basel, Switzerland; the Werra at Meiningen, Germany; and the Tisza at Szeged, Hungary). Incorporating imprecise historical information is found to reduce the range between the 5% and 95% Bayesian credibility bounds of the 100 year floods by 45% and 61% for the Rhine and Werra case studies, respectively. The strengths and limitations of the framework are discussed relative to alternative (non‐fuzzy) methods. The fuzzy Bayesian inference framework provides a flexible methodology that fits the imprecise nature of linguistic information on historical floods as available in historical written documentation.

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Historical hydrology for studying flood risk in Europe

Cited by 266 publications

References 58 publications

Quantitative historical hydrology in Europe

Quantitative historical hydrology in Europe

Modeling flood dynamics along the superelevated channel belt of the Yellow River over the last 3000 years

A fuzzy Bayesian approach to flood frequency estimation with imprecise historical information

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