Abstract
There is a strong inter-annual and inter-decadal variability in time series of flood-related variables, such as intense precipitation, high river discharge, flood magnitude, and flood loss at a range of spatial scales. Perhaps part of this variability is random or chaotic, but it is quite natural to seek driving factors, in a statistical sense. It is likely that climate variability (atmosphere–ocean oscillation) track plays an important role in the interpretation of the variability of flood-related characteristics, globally and, even more so, in several regions. The aim of this review paper is to create an inventory of information on spatially and temporally organized links of various climate-variability drivers with variability of characteristics of water abundance reported in scientific literature for a range of scales, from global to local. The climate variability indices examined in this paper are: El Niño-Southern Oscillations (ENSO), North Atlantic Oscillations (NAO), Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO), and Pacific Decadal Oscillations (PDO). A meta-analysis of results from many studies reported in scientific literature was carried out. The published results were collected and classified into categories after regions, climate variability modes, as well as flood-related variables: precipitation, river flow, and flood losses.
Highlights
Floods are major weather-related events that continue to cause high economic and human losses all over the Globe, reaching, on average, tens of billions of $US and thousands of fatalities per year.an understanding of mechanisms of temporal change and variability of floods and flood-related variables is of vast theoretical and practical interest and importance.The search for ubiquitous, spatially coherent trends in long time-series of hydro-climatic observation records has been very successful for temperature, less successful for precipitation, and even less so for river flow
There is a strong multi-annual and multi-decadal variability in flood-related variables. Perhaps part of this variability is random or chaotic, but there are serious arguments supporting the thesis that climate variability plays, generally, an important role in driving flood hazard over many areas of the world
Concluding Remarks persuading, spatially-coherent, trend could be detected in longlinks time series of flood-related
Summary
Floods are major weather-related events that continue to cause high economic and human losses all over the Globe, reaching, on average, tens of billions of $US and thousands of fatalities per year. There are four principal modes of climate variability that, according to a plethora of references, are of particular relevance for links with abundance of water—i.e., with characteristics of intense precipitation, high river discharge, and floods They are oscillations of quasi-periodicity of several years: ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) and NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation), as well as of several decades: AMO (Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation) and PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation). Brief information about these four modes of climate variability is given below.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call