Historical floods in the southeastern Iberian Peninsula since the 16th century: Trends and regional analysis of extreme flood events

Abstract

Studies related to historical floods have generated much knowledge about flood patterns and frequencies in recent years. Extending the series of floods to a longer range of time allows society to clarify what has happened in the past, and thus know what may happen in the future. From the descriptions of primary and secondary sources, a classification of historical floods has been carried out following a method specifically adapted for the study area. The southeastern Iberian Peninsula is the last region to compile historical floods in the Mediterranean Iberian Peninsula. Therefore, the main objective of the present study is to extend the flood series of historical events for four river basins: the Almanzora, Antas, Aguas and Andarax. First, flood events are classified according to their descriptions, generating a dataset of all flood events from 1500 to the present day for each basin. Second, we analyze the trends in the historical series, identifying four trend periods linked with the availability of records: 1500–1850, 1850–1900, 1900–1955 and 1955–2000. Notably, the trend in recent decades has broken with normality because of the large number of lower magnitude events. Lastly, we compare our dataset with seven historical series from different rivers elsewhere in the Iberian Peninsula. The results show a high correlation with all southeastern basins and less with the northern and Atlantic basins. For the purposes of the analysis, we considered only the extraordinary and catastrophic floods in all basins, that is, the floods of magnitude 3 or 4 (M3 or M4), and we identified two flood gaps in 1500–1540 and 1660–1720; two flood-poor periods in 1790–1845 and 1955–1970; and five flood-rich periods in 1540–1560, 1610–1654, 1720–1745, 1860–1891 and 1970–1990 in relation to the four river basins in the study area and the other seven Iberian basins, the last century is highly biased by the construction of reservoirs in all basins. The analysis of historical floods shows a link between the flood-gap periods and negative phases of NAOi and TSI. From 1970, lower flood magnitudes occurred during periods of highest amounts of information, an increase in tourism areas. Consequently, the last flood-rich period clearly stands out because of the disparity of the data, and the consequences are biased, for example, by surface runoff in urban areas where non-irrigated agricultural areas were traditionally located, resulting in an increase in economic damage.