Revising time series of the Elbe river discharge for flood frequency determination at gauge Dresden

Abstract

Abstract. The German research programme RIsk MAnagment of eXtreme flood events has accomplished the improvement of regional hazard assessment for the large rivers in Germany. Here we focused on the Elbe river at its gauge Dresden, which belongs to the oldest gauges in Europe with officially available daily discharge time series beginning on 1 January 1890. The project on the one hand aimed to extend and to revise the existing time series, and on the other hand to examine the variability of the Elbe river discharge conditions on a greater time scale. Therefore one major task were the historical searches and the examination of the retrieved documents and the contained information. After analysing this information the development of the river course and the discharge conditions were discussed. Using the provided knowledge, in an other subproject, a historical hydraulic model was established. Its results then again were used here. A further purpose was the determining of flood frequency based on all pre-processed data. The obtained knowledge about historical changes was also used to get an idea about possible future variations under climate change conditions. Especially variations in the runoff characteristic of the Elbe river over the course of the year were analysed. It succeeded to obtain a much longer discharge time series which contain fewer errors and uncertainties. Hence an optimized regional hazard assessment was realised.

Reconstruction of multi‐decadal groundwater level time‐series using a lumped conceptual model

“…(), Bartl et al . () and Wen (), and references therein. In contrast, there have been few previous attempts to reconstruct groundwater levels (Schilling and Einfalt, ; Chelmicki et al ., ; Ferguson and George, ; Conrads and Roehl, ; Najib et al ., ; Perez‐Valdivia and Sauchyn, ).…”

“…There is a mature literature on the reconstruction of river flows from climate data, refer for example to Jones (1984), Jones and Lister (1998), Jones et al (2006), Bartl et al (2009) and Wen (2009), and references therein. In contrast, there have been few previous attempts to reconstruct groundwater levels (Schilling and Einfalt, 1982;Chelmicki et al, 2002;Ferguson and George, 2003;Conrads and Roehl, 2007;Najib et al, 2008;Perez-Valdivia and Sauchyn, 2011).…”

The occurrence of floods and the role of climate variations from 1880 in Calabria (Southern Italy)

“…Knowing the long-term data series of past floods, the statistical analysis of return periods, frequency, seasonality and severity of floods can be improved (Agasse, 2003;Bartl et al, 2009), thus contributing to the assessment of the role of climatic variability on floods (Seidel et al, 2009). Based on descriptions available in the historical data, past floods can be classified according to scales expressing their relative magnitude (Barriendos Vallve and Martin Vide, 1998;Benito et al, 2004;Mudelsee et al, 2004;Rohr, 2006;Copien et al, 2008).…”

“…This can be helpful in ungauged basins for which instrumental data are unavailable. Moreover, historical hydrology can gather data on extremely exceptional floods (Bartl et al, 2009;Balasch et al, 2010), which are difficult to analyse directly, because their recurrence period is longer than a human lifetime (Naulet et al, 2005).…”

Vistula River bed erosion processes and their influence on Warsaw’s flood safety

“…There are a number of studies showing the influence of river training works on flood conveyance (e.g. Smith & Winkley, 1996;Hudson et al, 2008;Bart et al, 2009).…”