Data expansion: the potential of grey literature for understanding floods

Abstract

Abstract. Sophisticated methods have been developed and become standard in analysing floods as well as for assessing flood risk. However, increasingly critique of the current standards and scientific practice can be found both in the flood hydrology community as well as in the risk community who argue that the considerable amount of information already available on natural disasters has not been adequately deployed and brought to effective use. We describe this phenomenon as a failure to synthesize knowledge that results from barriers and ignorance in awareness, use and management of the entire spectrum of relevant content, that is, data, information and knowledge. In this paper we argue that the scientific community in flood risk research ignores event-specific analysis and documentations as another source of data. We present results from a systematic search that includes an intensive study on sources and ways of information dissemination of flood-relevant publications. We obtain 186 documents that contain information on the sources, pathways, receptors and/or consequences for any of the 40 strongest trans-basin floods in Germany in the period 1952-2002. This study therefore provides the most comprehensive metadata collection of flood documentations for the considered geographical space and period. A total of 87.5 % of all events have been documented, and especially the most severe floods have received extensive coverage. Only 30 % of the material has been produced in the scientific/academic environment, and the majority of all documents (about 80 %) can be considered grey literature (i.e. literature not controlled by commercial publishers). Therefore, ignoring grey sources in flood research also means ignoring the largest part of knowledge available on single flood events (in Germany). Further, the results of this study underpin the rapid changes in information dissemination of flood event literature over the last decade. We discuss the options and obstacles of incorporating this data into the knowledge-building process in light of the current technological developments and international, interdisciplinary debates for data curation.

On the relationship between hydro-meteorological patterns and flood types

“…Examples in Central Europe are studies on the Elbe flood in August 2002 (Ulbrich et al, 2003a,b), the Rhine flood in January 1995 (Chbab, 1995;Engel, 1997) or the Danube flood in June 2013 (Blöschl et al, 2013). Furthermore, numerous reports and documentations about specific floods are compiled by governmental authorities and non-governmental bodies and are published as grey literature (Uhlemann et al, 2013). These descriptions are either qualitative or quantitative and in general limited to the case of severe flooding.…”

A quality assessment framework for natural hazard event documentation: application to trans-basin flood reports in Germany

“…This study is accompanied by the open accessible publication of the entire data set of flood event-specific reports and the results of the quality assessment . Together with the data set of Uhlemann (2012), which provides the bibliographic metadata to the flood reports, this opens the opportunity for rapid inclusion of information from flood reports in any new research question. Using the pedigree quality measure conjointly with the quality dimensions allows a quick overview of the contextual aspects covered by a report for any particular trans-basin flood event and allows any user to access the literature in a more directed way.…”

“…The search resulted in the identification of 186 relevant publications (see and the respective data supplement provided in Uhlemann, 2012). For the purpose of this study we use only reports that explicitly aim at documenting one or a number of flood events.…”

Surface water floods in Switzerland: what insurance claim records tell us about the damage in space and time

“…tioned to point out that this flood type is implicitly included by the definition of SWFs and pluvial floods. The term "flash floods" is used quite ambiguously in the literature (van Campenhout et al, 2015). Traditionally, it refers to fluvial floods triggered by short, intense and local storm events (e.g., Merz and Blöschl, 2003;Gaume et al, 2009;Falconer et al, 2009;Ruiz-Villanueva et al, 2012).…”

“…In contrast, gray literature covers the topic of SWFs rather extensively, which is reflected by the availability of many guidelines and manuals discussing how to prepare for and manage such floods, for instance for single objects in Switzerland (Egli, 2007;Rüttimann and Egli, 2010) or on communal or regional levels in Germany (e.g., Castro et al, 2008;DWA, 2013;LUBW, 2016) or France (e.g., CEPRI, 2014). This might exemplify that the scientific flood risk community is indeed quite oblivious of resourceful gray literature (Uhlemann et al, 2013). In any case, it indicates that the topic is a concern for the people, the responsible authorities and other stakeholders.…”