Floods
Changing flood types reshape Europe’s flood-rich eras
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Europe’s 1960–2010 flood-rich and flood-poor periods track shifts among rainfall-on-dry, rainfall-on-wet, rain-on-snow, and snowmelt floods, not rainfall totals alone.
Key findings
Process frequencies changed markedly: many catchments saw more Rain.Wet and fewer snowmelt floods. North and Mediterranean shifted from flood-rich to flood-poor; Atlantic Northwest went the other way. Process shifts and 7-day precipitation maxima significantly explain flood-poor anomalies; 1-day maxima explain less.
Methodology
Authors classified annual maximum floods in 1353 catchments (from a 2370-catchment database plus mHM soil-moisture) into Rain.Dry, Rain.Wet, Rain.Snow, and Snowmelt, detected flood-rich/poor anomalies, and tested process frequencies plus 7-day extreme rain as predictors.
Limitations
Classification uses thresholds and modelled soil moisture, so events can be mis-typed. 1960–2010 cannot isolate greenhouse forcing from decadal circulation. Mediterranean ‘worst of both worlds’ (scarcer water, stubborn large floods) is interpretive.
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