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Climate change is shifting Europe's flood patterns, and these regions are feeling the consequences
(Inside Climate News, 28 Aug 2019) A new study maps out which regions have seen increases in the magnitude of destructive river flooding, and why.
Global warming is driving big changes in floods across Europe by fueling the atmosphere with more moisture and changing the path and speed of rain storms, new research shows.
In some areas, that means more rainfall and surging rivers that could overwhelm levees if communities don't plan for increasing flooding. Other regions have seen a decline in rain and snow, which sets up a different challenge: as flood risk there decreases, it could discourage investments in defensive measures, leaving communities vulnerable to less frequent but still damaging extreme storms.
The study shows "clear flood risk patterns across Europe that match the projected impacts of climate change," said Günther Blöschl, lead author of the study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, and director of the Centre for Water Resource Systems at the Vienna University of Technology.
To assess the continent's changing flood risks, a team of scientists from across Europe tracked the highest annual river flows at more than 3,700 stations over 50 years, from 1960 to 2010. In some of the local hotspots in northwestern Europe, they found the flows had increased by nearly 18 percent every decade. In other parts of Europe, flows had declined up to 23 percent per decade.
"For each year, we picked the maximum discharge and looked at how these annual peaks change over time," Blöschl said. He said the study is the first to clearly show regional patterns of flood magnitude across Europe driven by global warming.
Inside Climate News, 28 Aug 2019: Climate change is shifting Europe's flood patterns, and these regions are feeling the consequences
