Changing climate shifts timing of European floods

Abstract

A warming climate is expected to have an impact on the magnitude and timing of river floods; however, no consistent large-scale climate change signal in observed flood magnitudes has been identified so far. We analyzed the timing of river floods in Europe over the past five decades, using a pan-European database from 4262 observational hydrometric stations, and found clear patterns of change in flood timing. Warmer temperatures have led to earlier spring snowmelt floods throughout northeastern Europe; delayed winter storms associated with polar warming have led to later winter floods around the North Sea and some sectors of the Mediterranean coast; and earlier soil moisture maxima have led to earlier winter floods in western Europe. Our results highlight the existence of a clear climate signal in flood observations at the continental scale.

Measuring the changing pulse of rivers

“…Additionally, it can be difficult to disentangle the effects of changing climate, land cover, channel morphology, and human activities (2,4). On page n of this issue, Blöschl et al (5) overcome these problems through a consistent pan-European assessment of observed flood seasonality trends between 1960 and 2010. They thus provide the first evaluation of how climatic changes are influencing flood regimes at the continental scale.…”

The Global Streamflow Indices and Metadata Archive (GSIM) – Part 2: Quality control, time-series indices and homogeneity assessment

“…Kumar et al, 2009;Milly et al, 2005;Small et al, 2006;Stahl et al, 2010Stahl et al, , 2012, indices that can be used to characterize changes in the seasonal cycle (e.g. Blöschl et al, 2017;Cunderlik and Ouarda, 2009;Ehsanzadeh and Adamowski, 2010;Hidalgo et al, 2009;Moore et al, 2007;Rauscher et al, 2008;Regonda et al, 2005;Stewart et al, 2005), time series of annual percentiles (e.g. Lins and Slack, 1999;Zhang et al, 2001), flood indices (e.g.…”

A 60-Minute Design Rainstorm for the Urban Area of Yangpu District, Shanghai, China

“…The inevitable trend of global climate change has brought about considerably frequent occurrences of extreme climate events [1][2][3][4]. Recently, under the influence of typhoons, urban floods caused by rainstorms have exerted great harm on the safety of society.…”