Pan-European hydrodynamic models and their ability to identify compound floods

The interaction between storm surges and inland run-off has been gaining increasing attention recently, as they have the potential to result in compound floods. In Europe, several flood events of this type have been recorded in the past century in Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy and UK. First projections of compound flood hazard under climate...

Trends in flood losses in Europe over the past 150 years

Adverse consequences of floods change in time and are influenced by both natural and socio-economic trends and interactions. In Europe, previous studies of historical flood losses corrected for demographic and economic growth (‘normalized’) have been limited in temporal and spatial extent, leading to an incomplete representation of trends in...

Accuracy of pan-European coastal flood mapping

Coastal flood maps covering the whole European continent have become available in recent years. However, their ability to complement or replace high-resolution local flood maps was not investigated so far. In this paper we compare pan-European estimates of extreme sea levels and coastal flood extents at given return periods with observations and...

HANZE: a pan-European database of exposure to natural hazards and damaging historical floods since 1870

The influence of social and economic change on the consequences of natural hazards has been a matter of much interest recently. However, there is a lack of comprehensive, high-resolution data on historical changes in land use, population or assets available to study this topic. Here, we present HANZE database, or ‘Historical Analysis of Natural...

Efficient pan-European river flood hazard modelling through a combination of statistical and physical models

Flood hazard is currently being researched on continental and global scales, using models of increasing complexity. In this paper we investigate a different, simplified approach, which combines statistical and physical models in place of conventional rainfall-run-off models to carry out flood mapping for Europe. A Bayesian-network-based model...

Trends in flood exposure and vulnerability: Europe 1870–2016

Objectives<br/>Since the beginning of the second industrial revolution in the second half of the 19th century, Europe’s society and economy has been profoundly transformed. The population doubled in the last 150 years, together with more than fourfold increase in number of dwellings and 30-fold increase in production value in real terms. At the...