Documentary evidence of past floods in Europe and their utility in flood frequency estimation

Kjeldsen, Thomas; Macdonald, Neil; Lang, Michel; Mediero, Luis; Albuquerque, Teresa; Bogdanowicz, Ewa; Brázdil, Rudolf; Castellarin, Attilio; David, Václav; Fleig, Anne; Gül, Gülay Onuşluel; Kriaučiūnienė, Jūratė; Kohnová, Silvia; Merz, Bruno; Nicholson, Oliver; Roald, Lars A.; Salinas, José Luis; Šarauskienė, Diana; Šraj, Mojca; Strupczewski, Witold G.; Szolgay, Ján; Toumazis, Antonis; Vanneuville, Wouter; Veijalainen, Noora; Wilson, Donna

doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2014.06.038

Cited by 136 publications

(105 citation statements)

References 72 publications

(63 reference statements)

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“…Overall, the widespread recommendation of using ML based methods when historical information is available at a location of interest documented in [8] seems to be a sensible one. Within the FEH Local project the sensitivity of the estimation procedures to model misspecifications was also investigated, showing that the reduction in uncertainty is still present even when the historical information might be slightly imprecise.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…PWMs and L-moments are widely used in hydrology, due to their good performance with small samples and the simplicity of their calculation. Nevertheless the use of PPWMs for the estimation of the distribution parameters in the presence of historical information seem to be rare [8]. Since the methods used in the UK for flood frequency analysis are based on the L-moments framework, the use of PPWM when historical data are available might open the way to the routine inclusion of historical events in flood risk assessment.…”

Section: Partial Probability Weighted Momentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The paper only focuses on the statistical aspects of the design event estimation when historical data are present, and does not discuss the practicalities of identifying and quantifying historical data. The literature on these topics is vast; the reader is referred to [5,8] and references therein for more discussion on the steps necessary for the creation of a reliable database of historical events.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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FEH Local: Improving flood estimates using historical data

et al. 2016

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Abstract. The traditional approach to design flood estimation (for example, to derive the 100-year flood) is to apply a statistical model to time series of peak river flow measured by gauging stations. Such records are typically not very long, for example in the UK only about 10% of the stations have records that are more than 50 years in length. A long-explored way to augment the data available from a gauging station is to derive information about historical flood events and paleo-floods, which can be obtained from careful exploration of archives, old newspapers, flood marks or other signs of past flooding that are still discernible in the catchment, and the history of settlements. The inclusion of historical data in flood frequency estimation has been shown to substantially reduce the uncertainty around the estimated design events and is likely to provide insight into the rarest events which might have pre-dated the relatively short systematic records. Among other things, the FEH Local project funded by the Environment Agency aims to develop methods to easily incorporate historical information into the standard method of statistical flood frequency estimation in the UK. Different statistical estimation procedures are explored, namely maximum likelihood and partial probability weighted moments, and the strengths and weaknesses of each method are investigated. The project assesses the usefulness of historical data and aims to provide practitioners with useful guidelines to indicate in what circumstances the inclusion of historical data is likely to be beneficial in terms of reducing both the bias and the variability of the estimated flood frequency curves. The guidelines are based on the results of a large Monte Carlo simulation study, in which different estimation procedures and different data availability scenarios are studied. The study provides some indication of the situations under which different estimation procedures might give a better performance.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Partial Probability Weighted Momentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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FEH Local: Improving flood estimates using historical data

et al. 2016

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“…For example rainfall-runoff models use information on the catchment to provide estimates of the entire hydrograph, for rainfall events of given rarity. ReFEH (Kjeldsen 2007) is the model used in the UK within the Flood Estimation Handbook, but several other models are proposed in the literature. In general, when estimating flood frequency curves, it would be ideal to use as much knowledge as possible about the site for which the estimation is carried out, combining both the hydrological knowledge of the analysis and using all available data in the best possible way.…”

Section: Statistical Models For the Frequency Of Extremes Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

German tanks and historical records: the estimation of the time coverage of ungauged extreme events

Prosdocimi

2017

Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess

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The use of historical data can significantly reduce the uncertainty around estimates of the magnitude of rare events obtained with extreme value statistical models. For historical data to be included in the statistical analysis a number of their properties, e.g. their number and magnitude, need to be known with a reasonable level of confidence. Another key aspect of the historical data which needs to be known is the coverage period of the historical information, i.e. the period of time over which it is assumed that all large events above a certain threshold are known. It might be the case though, that it is not possible to easily retrieve with sufficient confidence information on the coverage period, which therefore needs to be estimated. In this paper methods to perform such estimation are introduced and evaluated. The statistical definition of the problem corresponds to estimating the size of a population for which only few data points are available. This problem is generally refereed to as the German tanks problem, which arose during the second world war, when statistical estimates of the number of tanks available to the German army were obtained. Different estimators can be derived using different statistical estimation approaches, with the maximum spacing estimator being the minimum-variance unbiased estimator. The properties of three estimators are investigated by means of a simulation study, both for the simple estimation of the historical coverage and for the estimation of the extreme value statistical model. The maximum spacing estimator is confirmed to be a good approach to the estimation of the historical period coverage for practical use and its application for a case study in Britain is presented.

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“…A recent review by Kjeldsen et al (2014) observed a scarce use of historical data for frequency estimates in 16 countries of Europe, identifying three main reasons: (1) the lack of unified database depositories, (2) uncertainty associated with discharge estimates, (3) concerns about violation of stationary assumption when using historical data, i.e. annual probabilities are equated to historical frequencies of occurrence.…”

Section: Flood Frequency Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative historical hydrology in Europe

Benito

Brázdil

Herget

et al. 2015

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. In recent decades, the quantification of flood hydrological characteristics (peak discharge, hydrograph shape, and runoff volume) from documentary evidence has gained scientific recognition as a method to lengthen flood records of rare and extreme events. This paper describes the methodological evolution of quantitative historical hydrology under the influence of developments in hydraulics and statistics. In the 19th century, discharge calculations based on flood marks were the only source of hydrological data for engineering design, but were later left aside in favour of systematic gauge records and conventional hydrological procedures. In the last two decades, there has been growing scientific and public interest in understanding long-term patterns of rare floods, in maintaining the flood heritage and memory of extremes, and developing methods for deterministic and statistical application to different scientific and engineering problems. A compilation of 46 case studies across Europe with reconstructed discharges demonstrates that (1) in most cases present flood magnitudes are not unusual within the context of the last millennium, although recent floods may exceed past floods in some temperate European rivers (e.g. the Vltava and Po rivers); (2) the frequency of extreme floods has decreased since the 1950s, although some rivers (e.g. the Gardon and Ouse rivers) show a reactivation of rare events over the last two decades. There is a great potential for gaining understanding of individual extreme events based on a combined multiproxy approach (palaeoflood and documentary records) providing high-resolution time flood series and their environmental and climatic changes; and for developing non-systematic and non-stationary statistical models based on relations of past floods with external and internal covariates under natural low-frequency climate variability.

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Documentary evidence of past floods in Europe and their utility in flood frequency estimation

Cited by 136 publications

References 72 publications

FEH Local: Improving flood estimates using historical data

FEH Local: Improving flood estimates using historical data

German tanks and historical records: the estimation of the time coverage of ungauged extreme events

Quantitative historical hydrology in Europe

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