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Current European flood-rich period exceptional compared with past 500 years

Nature volume 583, pages 560–566 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

There are concerns that recent climate change is altering the frequency and magnitude of river floods in an unprecedented way1. Historical studies have identified flood-rich periods in the past half millennium in various regions of Europe2. However, because of the low temporal resolution of existing datasets and the relatively low number of series, it has remained unclear whether Europe is currently in a flood-rich period from a long-term perspective. Here we analyse how recent decades compare with the flood history of Europe, using a new database composed of more than 100 high-resolution (sub-annual) historical flood series based on documentary evidence covering all major regions of Europe. We show that the past three decades were among the most flood-rich periods in Europe in the past 500 years, and that this period differs from other flood-rich periods in terms of its extent, air temperatures and flood seasonality. We identified nine flood-rich periods and associated regions. Among the periods richest in floods are 1560–1580 (western and central Europe), 1760–1800 (most of Europe), 1840–1870 (western and southern Europe) and 1990–2016 (western and central Europe). In most parts of Europe, previous flood-rich periods occurred during cooler-than-usual phases, but the current flood-rich period has been much warmer. Flood seasonality is also more pronounced in the recent period. For example, during previous flood and interflood periods, 41 per cent and 42 per cent of central European floods occurred in summer, respectively, compared with 55 per cent of floods in the recent period. The exceptional nature of the present-day flood-rich period calls for process-based tools for flood-risk assessment that capture the physical mechanisms involved, and management strategies that can incorporate the recent changes in risk.

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Fig. 1: Flood-rich periods in Europe in the past 500 years.
Fig. 2: Flood intensities and flood-rich periods.
Fig. 3: Flood-rich periods in Europe.
Fig. 4: Anomalies of annual air temperatures from their 1961–1990 mean within and outside flood-rich periods in central Europe.
Fig. 5: Seasonality of floods within and outside flood-rich periods in central Europe.

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Data availability

The flood index data that were used in this paper and an extended list of references are available at https://github.com/tuwhydro/500yrfloods. The air temperature data are available at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo-search/study/9970

Code availability

The data analysis was performed in R using the supporting package fields for the thin plate spline interpolation (function fastTps). The code used can be downloaded from https://github.com/tuwhydro/500yrfloods.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the ERC Advanced Grant ‘FloodChange’ project (no. 291152), the Horizon 2020 ETN ‘System Risk’ project (no. 676027), the DFG project FOR 2416, the FWF projects I 3174 and W1219-N22, the Spanish Agency of Science and FEDER/UE projects CGL2016-75475/R, CGL2017-86839-C3-1-R, CGL2016-75996-R and CTM2017-83655-C2-2-R, the ICREA Academia programme, and project CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000797, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic. We acknowledge all flood data providers listed in Extended Data Table 1 and thank J. Lajus for pointing us to the published Neva series.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Günter Blöschl, Andrea Kiss, Alberto Viglione

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Günter Blöschl, Andrea Kiss, Julia Hall, Jürgen Komma, David Lun, Juraj Parajka & Peter Valent

  2. Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI), Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy

    Alberto Viglione & Klaus Haslinger

  3. Department of History and Archaeology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Mariano Barriendos

  4. Institute of Geography, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

    Oliver Böhm

  5. Institute of Geography, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Rudolf Brázdil

  6. Global Change Research Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno, Czech Republic

    Rudolf Brázdil & Monika Bělínová

  7. ACTHYS-Diffusion, Grenoble, France

    Denis Coeur

  8. Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium

    Gaston Demarée

  9. Department of Applied Physics, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Maria Carmen Llasat

  10. Department of Geography and Planning, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Neil Macdonald

  11. Department of Economic History and International Relations, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Dag Retsö

  12. Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, Oslo, Norway

    Lars Roald

  13. Hydrology Division, Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), Bern, Switzerland

    Petra Schmocker-Fackel

  14. Department of History, Political and International Studies, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Inês Amorim

  15. Department of Geology, National Museum of Natural Sciences, CSIC, Madrid, Spain

    Gerardo Benito

  16. Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Chiara Bertolin

  17. National Research Council, Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Padua, Italy

    Dario Camuffo

  18. VRVis Research Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization, Vienna, Austria

    Daniel Cornel & Jürgen Waser

  19. Centre for Flood and Drought Modelling, Institute of Meteorology and Water Management, National Research Institute, Warsaw, Poland

    Radosław Doktor

  20. Czech Hydrometeorological Institute, Prague, Czech Republic

    Líbor Elleder

  21. Kleio Studio Associate Research Company, Padua, Italy

    Silvia Enzi

  22. Faculty of Arts, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    João Carlos Garcia

  23. Department of Physical Geography, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Rüdiger Glaser & Johannes Schönbein

  24. Climate Research Department, Central Institute of Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG), Vienna, Austria

    Michael Hofstätter

  25. Centre for Poland’s Climate Monitoring, Institute of Meteorology and Water Management, National Research Institute, Cracow, Poland

    Danuta Limanówka

  26. Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

    Andrei Panin

  27. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia

    Andrei Panin

  28. Department of History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

    Hrvoje Petrić

  29. Department of Chemistry and Physics, University of Almería, Almería, Spain

    Fernando S. Rodrigo

  30. Department of Economic, Social and Environmental History, Institute of History, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Christian Rohr & Oliver Wetter

  31. Department of Geography, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Lothar Schulte

  32. Transdisciplinary Research Centre Culture, Space and Memory, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Luís Pedro Silva

  33. Department of Physical Geography, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Willem H. J. Toonen

  34. Department of Land and Water Resources Management, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia

    Peter Valent

Authors
  1. Günter Blöschl
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  2. Andrea Kiss
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Contributions

G. Blöschl, A.K. and A.V. designed the study and wrote the first draft of the paper. G. Blöschl initiated the study and provided guidance for the analyses. A.K. collated the database with the help of most of the co-authors and provided guidance for the analyses. A.V. performed all quantitative analyses of the flood data. M. Barriendos, O.B., R.B., D. Coeur, G.D., A.K., M.C.L., N.M., D.R., L.R., P.S.-F., I.A., M. Bělínová, G. Benito, C.B., D. Camuffo, R.D., L.E., S.E., J.C.G., R.G., D. Limanówka, A. P., H.P., F.S.R., C.R., J.S., L.S., L.P.S., W.H.J.T. and O.W. developed historical river flood series. J.H., K.H., M.H., J.K., D. Lun, J.P. and P.V. advised on the data analysis. D. Cornel and J.W. rendered Fig. 1 and the Supplementary Video. All authors interpreted results, and contributed to framing and revising the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Günter Blöschl.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature thanks Anouk Bomers, Francis Ludlow, Olivier Payrastre and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Locations of the flood series.

Series indicated by red circles are used for the interpolation of the flood intensities (names as in Extended Data Table 1 and Extended Data Fig. 2). Series indicated by orange circles are supplementary and only used for the seasonality analysis. Thick grey lines indicate regions used in the analysis.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Duration, representativeness index and bias index of the flood data series.

The greyscale refers to the representativeness index that reflects the degree of data representativeness in a regional context (light grey, low representativeness (u = 1); dark grey, average representativeness (u = 2); black, high representativeness (u = 3)). The line width refers to the bias index that reflects the completeness of the source material in a historical context (no line, no data; thin line, period with possibly missing data; average line, average; thick line, period with overly dense data).

Extended Data Fig. 3 Raw data of flood intensities.

Great (class 2) and extraordinary (class 3) floods are marked by orange and red dots, respectively. Thin lines show the interpolated flood intensities. Flood-rich periods are shown as light grey areas.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Anomalies of annual air temperatures.

The anomalies are taken from the 1961–1990 mean of annual air temperatures within and outside flood-rich periods in southern Europe (top) and western Europe (bottom). a, c, Time series of air temperature anomalies (grey line) and their averages and 90% confidence bounds (black lines), and flood-rich periods indicated by colour bars. b, d, Relationship between mean temperature anomalies in flood-rich periods and those of the intervals in between. Error bars show 90% confidence bounds. Colours correspond to those of the flood-rich periods in a, c.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Flood seasonality.

Seasonality of floods is shown within and outside flood-rich periods in southern Europe (top) and western Europe (bottom). a, c, Time series of smoothed frequency of floods in four seasons (green lines, spring; red, summer; brown, autumn; blue, winter) and flood-rich periods indicated by colour bars. b, d, Frequency of floods in four seasons. Left bars, interflood periods; middle bars, flood-rich periods of the past; right bars, flood-rich period IX (1990–2016). Error bars show 90% confidence bounds.

Extended Data Table 1 Flood series, data contributors and countries, involved in the present study
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Flood-rich periods in Europe in the past 500 years
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Video 1

Dynamic visualisation of the flood-rich periods in Europe in the past 500 years and their relationship to air temperature.

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Blöschl, G., Kiss, A., Viglione, A. et al. Current European flood-rich period exceptional compared with past 500 years. Nature 583, 560–566 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2478-3

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