Floods and climate: emerging perspectives for flood risk assessment and management

Abstract

Abstract. Flood estimation and flood management have traditionally been the domain of hydrologists, water resources engineers and statisticians, and disciplinary approaches have abound. Dominant views have been shaped; one example is the catchment perspective: floods are formed and influenced by the interaction of local, catchment-specific characteristics, such as meteorology, topography and geology. These traditional views have been beneficial, but they have a narrow framing. In this paper we contrast traditional views with broader perspectives that are emerging from an improved understanding of the climatic context of floods. We conclude: (1) extending the traditional system boundaries (local catchment, recent decades, hydrological/hydraulic processes) opens up exciting possibilities for better understanding and improved tools for flood risk assessment and management. (2) Statistical approaches in flood estimation need to be complemented by the search for the causal mechanisms and dominant processes in the atmosphere, catchment and river system that leave their fingerprints on flood characteristic. (3) Natural climate variability leads to time-varying flood characteristics, and this variation may be partially quantifiable and predictable, with the perspective of a dynamic, climate informed flood risk management. (4) Efforts are needed to fully account for factors that contribute to changes in all three risk components (hazard, exposure, vulnerability), and to better understand the interactions between society and floods. (5) Given the global scale and societal importance, we call for the organization of an international multidisciplinary collaboration and data sharing initiative to understand further the links between climate and flooding and to advance flood research.

Synchronization and Delay Between Circulation Patterns and High Streamflow Events in Germany

“…Since the most disastrous floods in Europe occur as a result of heavy rainfall falling between 3 and 48 hr (Barredo, 2007), we focus on the long and short rain floods. Because such floods are driven by atmospheric phenomena at the synoptic scale, the investigation about the link between flood occurrence and large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns assumes a particular relevance (Merz et al, 2014). Historically, variations of the pressure fields, temperature, and winds have been assumed as representative of large-scale atmospheric phenomena influencing floods (Bhalme & Mooley, 1980;Jain & Lall, 2000;Trenberth & Guillemot, 1996).…”

Small and Medium-Scale River Flood Controls in Highly Urbanized Areas: A Whole Region Perspective

“…While this study provides a new idea of flood control, there are some caveats when the idea is applied in other regions. For one, MIKE 21 has high requirements for data; for tributaries and rivers, when simulating small-scale areas using the model, it needs a precise spatial resolution, whilst it is unable to predict elevation differences in floodplain modeling, which has its own significance in accurate results [54,55]. Second, there are some differences between the data obtained in the research area and the requirements of the model, and considering errors such as the generalization of the river network and grids as well as the changes in working conditions in the model, the verification of the one-dimensional model and the two-dimensional model is seemingly simple.…”

Research on the Risk Assessment of Qingdao Marine Disaster Based on Flooding

“…According to the literature, there has been relatively little research on the risk assessment of flooding disasters based on sea-land characteristics. Some of the studies only focused on the generation of flooding and considered cities as different kinds of sloping interfaces from the perspective of marine science [19][20][21][22]. And the RISC-KIT (resilience-increasing strategies for coasts-toolkit) index-method was applied in the Molise region, which takes the natural, social, and economic factors into consideration and focuses on the hazard and exposure indicators.…”

“…Moreover, the dynamic models were coupled with the RISC-KIT index-method which paid attention to coastal vulnerability and risk from the perspective of the storm surge and sea level rise in England, Italy, Poland, and other countries [4,[23][24][25][26]. Other research has addressed this topic from a terrestrial science perspective and focused on flooding caused by urban rivers and the impact of disaster losses, while ignoring the natural processes related to the unique source of flooding in coastal zones [20,23,[27][28][29].…”