No upward trends in the occurrence of extreme floods in central Europe

Mudelsee, Manfred; Börngen, Michael; Tetzlaff, G.; Grünewald, Uwe

doi:10.1038/nature01928

Cited by 380 publications

(316 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Because they are widely used in studies of this kind, the interested reader is pointed to the literature (Helsel and Hirsch, 1993). Even though these tests can detect monotonic and not only linear trends (as the Pearson test does), it is acknowledged that there is a possibility that other patterns can be more suitable to describe the data (Hall and Tajvidi, 2000;Ramesh and Davison, 2002;Mudelsee et al, 2003;Villarini et al, 2009b. The statistical significance of Mann-Kendall and Spearman tests is set to 5%.…”

Section: Change-point and Trend Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyses of extreme flooding in Austria over the period 1951–2006

Villarini

Smith

Serinaldi

et al. 2011

Intl Journal of Climatology

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ABSTRACT:Analyses of extreme flooding in Austria is performed using daily discharge time series from 27 stations over the period . The main research questions revolve around: (1) temporal non-stationarities in the flood record, (2) upper tail and scaling properties of the flood peak records, and (3) relation between magnitude and frequency of flooding and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Two datasets are derived from the daily discharge time series: annual maximum daily discharge and peaks-over-threshold (POT) data. The validity of the stationarity assumption in the annual maximum discharge record is assessed by investigating the presence of abrupt and slowly varying changes using nonparametric tests. The time series are tested for abrupt changes both in the mean and variance of the flood peak distributions by means of the Pettitt test. The presence of monotonic trends is investigated by means of the Mann-Kendall and Spearman tests. Violations of the stationarity assumption are associated with abrupt rather than gradual changes. These step changes generally involve river regulation through construction of dams or other major engineering works. It is not possible to make conclusive statements about the presence of an anthropogenic climate change signal in the flood peak record. Similar conclusions are obtained when focussing on the frequency of POT floods. The Generalised Extreme Value distribution is used to study the upper tail and scaling properties of annual maximum daily discharge records. The location and scale parameters exhibit power-law behaviour as a function of drainage area. The shape parameters indicate that the flood peak distributions for Austria have a heavy tail. Non-stationary modelling of the annual maximum daily discharge and POT time series is used to explore the relation between flood magnitude and frequency and NAO. The results indicate that NAO is a significant covariate in explaining the magnitude and frequency of occurrence of flooding over a large part of Austria.

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Section: Change-point and Trend Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyses of extreme flooding in Austria over the period 1951–2006

Villarini

Smith

Serinaldi

et al. 2011

Intl Journal of Climatology

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“…One seeks to disprove the hypothesis of a constant occurrence rate when the P value is lower than 0.05. Kernel occurrence rate estimation with bootstrap confidence band construction was introduced into the analysis of climate extremes by Mudelsee et al (2003); a detailed description is given by Mudelsee et al (2004). The software used for occurrence rate estimation was XTREND (Mudelsee 2002).…”

Section: Tendencies In the Occurrence Ratementioning

confidence: 99%

A 229-year dendroclimatic-inferred record of forest fire activity for the Boreal Shield of Canada

Girardin

Tardif

Gauthier

et al. 2006

Int. J. Wildland Fire

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Abstract. Six independent tree-ring reconstructions of summer drought were calibrated against instrumental fire data to develop a 229-year dendroclimatic-inferred record of fire activity (annual area burned and fire occurrence) on the Boreal Shield, Canada. As a means of validating the statistical reconstructions of the fire activity, a comparison was made with a stand age distribution derived from a regional time-since-last-fire map for an area located at the transition between the mixedwood and coniferous boreal forests of south-western Quebec. Calibration statistics indicated that 31% of the area burned variance and 45% of the fire occurrence variance could be accounted for by the six drought reconstructions. The verification statistics indicated a tendency for the statistical reconstructions of the fire activity to reproduce with confidence both high and relatively low frequency variations in fire. Episodes of succeeding years with important fire activity were estimated for

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“…This suggests that the effect of climate is the dominant control on river flood frequency. Mudelsee et al, (2003) reported that there was no upward trend in the frequency of flow extremes in Central Europe. For the Elbe and Oder rivers the frequency of flood occurrence in winter has decreased, while there is no trend in summer floods.…”

Section: Flooding Issues In the Ukmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rural land management impacts on catchment scale flood risk

Pattison¹

2010

Role of Hydrology in Managing Consequences of a Changing Global Environment

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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source• a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses• the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Most approaches to this problem aim to upscale from individual grid cells to whole catchments, something that restricts the complexity of possible process representation, produces models that may not be parsimonious with the data needed to calibrate them and, faced with data uncertainties, provides computational limitations on the extent to which model uncertainty can be fully explored. Rather than upscaling to problems of concern, this thesis seeks to downscale from locations of known flood risk, as a means of identifying where land use management changes might be beneficial and then uses numerical modelling to identify the kinds of management changes required in those downscaled locations. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to test an approach to understanding the impacts of rural land management upon flood risk based upon catchment-to-source downscaling.This thesis uses the case study of the River Eden catchment (2400 km 2 ) as a test (1) it was shown to have a significant impact on downstream flood risk; and (2) it had range of data and information needed for modelling land use changes.The second part of this thesis explored the land management scenarios that could be used to reduce flood risk at the catchment scale. The scenarios to be tested were determined through a stakeholder participation approach, whereby workshops were held to brainstorm and prioritise land management options, and then to identify specific locations within the Eamont sub-catchment where they could tested. There were two main types of land management scenarios chosen: (1) landscape-scale changes, including afforestation and compaction; and (2) corresponding to a 5.8% decrease in peak discharge. A key conclusion is that land management practices have been shown to have an effect on catchment scale flooding, even for extreme flood events. However, the effect of land management scenarios are both spatially and temporally dependent i.e. the same land management practice has different effects depending on where it is implemented, and when implemented in the same location has different effects on different flood events.

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No upward trends in the occurrence of extreme floods in central Europe

Cited by 380 publications

References 10 publications

Analyses of extreme flooding in Austria over the period 1951–2006

Analyses of extreme flooding in Austria over the period 1951–2006

A 229-year dendroclimatic-inferred record of forest fire activity for the Boreal Shield of Canada

Rural land management impacts on catchment scale flood risk

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