Abstract
Abstract. The current work addresses one of the key building blocks towards an improved understanding of flood processes and associated changes in flood characteristics and regimes in Europe: the development of a comprehensive, extensive European flood database. The presented work results from ongoing cross-border research collaborations initiated with data collection and joint interpretation in mind. A detailed account of the current state, characteristics and spatial and temporal coverage of the European Flood Database, is presented. At this stage, the hydrological data collection is still growing and consists at this time of annual maximum and daily mean discharge series, from over 7000 hydrometric stations of various data series lengths. Moreover, the database currently comprises data from over 50 different data sources. The time series have been obtained from different national and regional data sources in a collaborative effort of a joint European flood research agreement based on the exchange of data, models and expertise, and from existing international data collections and open source websites. These ongoing efforts are contributing to advancing the understanding of regional flood processes beyond individual country boundaries and to a more coherent flood research in Europe.
Highlights
Flooding is a re-occurring hydrological phenomenon that often does not affect a single catchment but rather goes beyond catchment boundaries resulting in a regional hazard that transects political boundaries
The database will be further developed and the associated research questions will be approached through further collaborations and research agreements based on the exchange of data, models, staff, and expertise
The current direction of further database development aims to increase the temporal coverage so that the satisfactory spatial coverage can be maintained across all time periods
Summary
Flooding is a re-occurring hydrological phenomenon that often does not affect a single catchment but rather goes beyond catchment boundaries resulting in a regional hazard that transects political boundaries. To improve our understanding of flood processes and associated changes in flood regimes at a European scale, a single extensive large scale database is essential (Hall et al, 2014), as currently this data is dispersed in various national and international data sources, some of which are only recorded on paper. In the course of developing this database, an attempt is being made to bring all these different data sources together, and to merge the different formats of existing or new (not yet digitised) data sources into a comprehensive European Flood Database These ongoing efforts in building the database are a key building block and cross-border research collaborations are contributing to advancing the understanding of regional flood processes beyond individual country boundaries and to making flood research more coherent in Europe. A detailed account of the current state, spatial and temporal coverage of the preliminary state of European Flood Database (as of January 2015), is presented together with a summary and outlook on the still ongoing work on the database
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