Description
The map depicts flood prone areas at global scale for flood events with 500-year return period. Resolution is 30 arcseconds (approx. 1km). Cell values indicate water depth (in m). NOTE: this dataset is based on JRC elaborations and is not an official flood hazard map (for details and limitations please refer to related publications).
Contact
Contributors
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- Francesco Dottori
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0000-0002-1388-3303
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- Lorenzo Alfieri
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0000-0002-3616-386X
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- Peter Salamon
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0000-0002-5419-5398
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- Alessandra Bianchi
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- Luc Feyen
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- Feyera Hirpa
How to cite
Dottori, Francesco; Alfieri, Lorenzo; Salamon, Peter; Bianchi, Alessandra; Feyen, Luc; Hirpa, Feyera (2016): Flood hazard map of the World - 500-year return period. European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC) [Dataset] PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/jrc-floods-floodmapgl_rp500y-tif
Keywords
Data access
Flood hazard map of the World - 500-year return period
Publications
- IOP PUBLISHING LTD, BRISTOL, ENGLAND
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Abstract
Quantifying flood hazard is an essential component of resilience planning, emergency response, and mitigation, including insurance. Traditionally undertaken at catchment and national scales, recently, efforts have intensified to estimate flood risk globally to better allow consistent and equitable decision making. Global flood hazard models are now a practical reality, thanks to improvements in numerical algorithms, global datasets, computing power, and coupled modelling frameworks. Outputs of these models are vital for consistent quantification of global flood risk and in projecting the impacts of climate change. However, the urgency of these tasks means that outputs are being used as soon as they are made available and before such methods have been adequately tested. To address this, we compare multi-probability flood hazard maps for Africa from six global models and show wide variation in their flood hazard, economic loss and exposed population estimates, which has serious implications for model credibility. While there is around 30%–40% agreement in flood extent, our results show that even at continental scales, there are significant differences in hazard magnitude and spatial pattern between models, notably in deltas, arid/semi-arid zones and wetlands. This study is an important step towards a better understanding of modelling global flood hazard, which is urgently required for both current risk and climate change projections.
- ELSEVIER SCI LTD, OXFORD, ENGLAND
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Abstract
Nowadays, the development of high-resolution flood hazard models have become feasible at continental and global scale, and their application in developing countries and data-scarce regions can be extremely helpful to increase preparedness of population and reduce catastrophic impacts. The present work describes the development of a novel procedure for global flood hazard mapping, based on the most recent advances in large scale flood modelling. We derive a long-term dataset of daily river discharges from the global hydrological simulations of the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS). Streamflow data is downscaled on a high resolution river network and processed to provide the input for local flood inundation simulations, performed with a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model. All flood-prone areas identified along the river network are then merged to create continental flood hazard maps for different return periods at 30’’ resolution. We evaluate the performance of our methodology in several large river basins by comparing simulated flood maps with a mosaic of flooded areas detected from satellite images for the same reference period. We further investigate the sensitivity of the flood modelling framework to different parameters and modelling approaches and identify strengths, limitations and possible improvements of the methodology.
Geographic areas
Additional information
- Published by
- European Commission, Joint Research Centre
- Created date
- 2018-12-14
- Modified date
- 2023-10-26
- Issued date
- 2016-11-02
- Landing page
- https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/research-topic/floods
- Language(s)
- English
- Data theme(s)
- Environment, Science and technology
- Update frequency
- irregular
- Identifier
- http://data.europa.eu/89h/jrc-floods-floodmapgl_rp500y-tif
- Popularity
-