Brief Communication: An update of the article &amp;quot;Modelling flood damages under climate change conditions – a case study for Germany&amp;quot;

Fred Fokko Hattermann,Peter Hoffmann,Shaochun Huang,Zbigniew W Kundzewicz,Olaf Burghoff

doi:10.5194/nhess-16-1617-2016

Abstract

Abstract. In our first study on possible flood damages under climate change in Germany, we reported that a considerable increase in flood-related losses can be expected in a future warmer climate. However, the general significance of the study was limited by the fact that outcome of only one global climate model (GCM) was used as a large-scale climate driver, while many studies report that GCMs are often the largest source of uncertainty in impact modelling. Here we show that a much broader set of global and regional climate model combinations as climate drivers show trends which are in line with the original results and even give a stronger increase of damages.

Highlights

Many studies have pointed out that an increase in temperature will amplify the hydrological cycle, and intense precipitation will increase (Kundzewicz and Schellnhuber, 2004)
An increase in specific air humidity and intense precipitation, as well as in frequency of “wet” atmospheric circulation patterns, has been reported for Germany (Hattermann et al, 2012). This is why the German Insurance Association has commissioned a study with the aim to estimate what flood damage would occur in individual river reaches of Germany under a warmer climate, solely considering the pure climate change impact and keeping socio-economic drivers constant
A limited number of regional climate projections were available for the impact study, and these projections were all driven by a single global circulation model (GCM), while different recent studies show that GCMs are often the largest source of uncertainty in impact modelling

Summary

Introduction

Many studies have pointed out that an increase in temperature will amplify the hydrological cycle, and intense precipitation will increase (Kundzewicz and Schellnhuber, 2004). An increase in specific air humidity and intense precipitation, as well as in frequency of “wet” atmospheric circulation patterns, has been reported for Germany (Hattermann et al, 2012) This is why the German Insurance Association has commissioned a study with the aim to estimate what flood damage would occur in individual river reaches of Germany under a warmer climate (published in Hattermann et al, 2014), solely considering the pure climate change impact and keeping socio-economic drivers constant. A limited number of regional climate projections were available for the impact study, and these projections were all driven by a single global circulation model (GCM), while different recent studies show that GCMs are often the largest source of uncertainty in impact modelling (cf Vetter et al, 2015). Investigation of climate change impacts on floods using the results of different RCMs as climate boundary conditions was carried out by Huang et al (2013), Hattermann et al (2011) and Falter et al (2015)

The climate forcing data

Results

Conclusions