4.7 Article

Flood frequencies and durations and their response to El Nino Southern Oscillation: Global analysis

Journal

JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGY
Volume 539, Issue -, Pages 358-378

Publisher

ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.05.045

Keywords

ENSO; Flood frequency; Flood duration; Global scale

Funding

  1. VENI Grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) [863.11.011]
  2. Academy of Finland project SCART [267463]
  3. AIG
  4. IPA
  5. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

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Floods are one of the most serious forms of natural hazards in terms of the damages they cause. In 2012 alone, flood damages exceeded $19 billion. A large proportion of the damages from several recent major flood disasters, such as those in South India and South Carolina (2015), England and Wales (2014), the Mississippi (2012), Thailand (2011), Queensland (Australia) (2010-2011), and Pakistan (2010), were related to the long duration of those flood events. However, most flood risk studies to date do not account for flood duration. In this paper, we provide the first global modelling exercise to assess the link between interannual climate variability and flood duration and frequency. Specifically, we examine relationships between simulated flood events and El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Our results show that the duration of flooding appears to be more sensitive to ENSO than is the case for flood frequency. At the globally aggregated scale, we found floods to be significantly longer during both El Nino and La Nino years, compared to neutral years. At the scale of individual river basins, we found strong correlations between ENSO and both flood frequency and duration for a large number of basins, with generally stronger correlations for flood duration than for flood frequency. Future research on flood impacts should attempt to incorporate more information on flood durations. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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