Meteorological, impact and climate perspectives of the 29 June 2017 heavy precipitation event in the Berlin metropolitan area

Abstract

Abstract. Extreme precipitation is a weather phenomenon with tremendous damaging potential for property and human life. As the intensity and frequency of such events is projected to increase in a warming climate, there is an urgent need to advance the existing knowledge on extreme precipitation processes, statistics and impacts across scales. To this end, a working group within the Germany-based project, ClimXtreme, has been established to carry out multidisciplinary analyses of high-impact events. In this work, we provide a comprehensive assessment of the 29 June 2017 heavy precipitation event (HPE) affecting the Berlin metropolitan region (Germany), from the meteorological, impacts and climate perspectives, including climate change attribution. Our analysis showed that this event occurred under the influence of a mid-tropospheric trough over western Europe and two shortwave surface lows over Britain and Poland (Rasmund and Rasmund II), inducing relevant low-level wind convergence along the German–Polish border. Over 11 000 convective cells were triggered, starting early morning 29 June, displacing northwards slowly under the influence of a weak tropospheric flow (10 m s−1 at 500 hPa). The quasi-stationary situation led to totals up to 196 mm d−1, making this event the 29 June most severe in the 1951–2021 climatology, ranked by means of a precipitation-based index. Regarding impacts, it incurred the largest insured losses in the period 2002 to 2017 (EUR 60 million) in the greater Berlin area. We provide further insights on flood attributes (inundation, depth, duration) based on a unique household-level survey data set. The major moisture source for this event was the Alpine–Slovenian region (63 % of identified sources) due to recycling of precipitation falling over that region 1 d earlier. Implementing three different generalised extreme value (GEV) models, we quantified the return periods for this case to be above 100 years for daily aggregated precipitation, and up to 100 and 10 years for 8 and 1 h aggregations, respectively. The conditional attribution demonstrated that warming since the pre-industrial era caused a small but significant increase of 4 % in total precipitation and 10 % for extreme intensities. The possibility that not just greenhouse-gas-induced warming, but also anthropogenic aerosols affected the intensity of precipitation is investigated through aerosol sensitivity experiments. Our multi-disciplinary approach allowed us to relate interconnected aspects of extreme precipitation. For instance, the link between the unique meteorological conditions of this case and its very large return periods, or the extent to which it is attributable to already-observed anthropogenic climate change.

A multi-disciplinary analysis of the exceptional flood event of July 2021 in central Europe – Part 2: Historical context and relation to climate change

“…Part 1). This was, for example, also the case in the 29 June 2017 event (Caldas-Alvarez et al, 2022a), where even higher precipitation totals were registered. Wet soils and local moisture recycling do not seem to be major factors in preconditioning and feeding the event.…”

Effects of land use change on runoff depth in the Songnen Plain, China

“…Global warming has caused the atmospheric boundary layer to hold more water vapor, resulting in a significant increase in the intensity of extreme precipitation in many regions. This has also affected the rates of the hydrological cycle and the processes of generating runoff in these areas [3] . Furthermore, extensive human activities such as the construction of water projects, urbanization, and deforestation have modified the conditions of catchment substrates and the distribution of water resources on both spatial and temporal scales.…”

Individual Flood Risk Adaptation in Germany: Exploring the Role of Different Types of Flooding

“…Germany made use of this option when adapting the Federal Water Act (Wasserhaushaltsgesetz -WHG) in 2009 to the requirements of the Floods Directive. However, in recent years, many German cities have experienced urban pluvial flooding, e.g., the city of Münster in 2014 (Spekkers et al, 2017) and Potsdam and Berlin in 2017 and 2019 (Caldas-Alvarez et al, 2022;Dillenardt et al, 2022). Moreover, fast-onset flash floods in the middle hills in May/June 2016 (Laudan et al, 2017;Piper et al, 2016) and July 2021 (Kreienkamp et al, 2021) had huge impacts, i.e., 11 fatalities and €2.6 billion of damage in 2016 and 190 fatalities and €33 billion of damage in 2021 (Thieken et al, 2023).…”