Description
(IMPORTANT NOTICE: This is version 1 of the European dataset of river flood hazard maps, for the most recent update please refer to the dataset
"River flood hazard maps for Europe and the Mediterranean Basin region") The maps depict flood prone areas for river flood events for six different flood frequencies (from 1-in-10-years to 1-in-500-years). The extent comprises most of the geographical Europe with the exclusion of the river basins in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Russia and Ukraine. Cell values indicate water depth (in m). The maps can be used to assess the exposure of population and economic assets to river floods, and to perform flood risk assessments. 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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- Alessandra Bianchi
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- Valerio Lorini
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- Luc Feyen
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- Peter Salamon
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0000-0002-5419-5398
How to cite
Dottori, Francesco; Alfieri, Lorenzo; Bianchi, Alessandra; Lorini, Valerio; Feyen, Luc; Salamon, Peter (2016): River flood hazard maps for Europe - version 1. European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC) [Dataset] PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/8e49997c-ba99-4ed1-9aec-059bb440001b
Publications
- WILEY-BLACKWELL, HOBOKEN, USA
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Abstract
Flood hazard maps at trans-national scale have potential for a large number of applications ranging from climate change studies, reinsurance products, aid to emergency operations for major flood crisis, among others. However, at continental scales, only few products are available, due to the difficulty of retrieving large consistent data sets. Moreover, these are produced at relatively coarse grid resolution, which limits their applications to qualitative assessments. At finer resolution, maps are often limited to country boundaries, due to limited data sharing at trans-national level. The creation of a European flood hazard map would currently imply a collection of scattered regional maps, often lacking mutual consistency due to the variety of adopted approaches and quality of the underlying input data.
In this work, we derive a pan-European flood hazard map at 100 m resolution. The proposed approach is based on expanding a literature cascade model through a physically based approach. A combination of distributed hydrological and hydraulic models was set up for the European domain. Then, an observed meteorological data set is used to derive a long-term streamflow simulation and subsequently coherent design flood hydrographs for a return period of 100 years along the pan-European river network. Flood hydrographs are used to simulate areas at risk of flooding and output maps are merged into a pan-European flood hazard map. The quality of this map is evaluated for selected areas in Germany and United Kingdom against national/regional hazard maps. Despite inherent limitations and model resolution issues, simulated maps are in good agreement with reference maps (hit rate between 59% and 78%, critical success index between 43% and 65%), suggesting strong potential for a number of applications at the European scale.
Geographic areas
Additional information
- Published by
- European Commission, Joint Research Centre
- Created date
- 2022-03-28
- Modified date
- 2024-03-11
- Issued date
- 2016-04-03
- Landing page
- https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/research-topic/floods
- Data theme(s)
- Environment, Science and technology
- Update frequency
- irregular
- Identifier
- http://data.europa.eu/89h/8e49997c-ba99-4ed1-9aec-059bb440001b
- Popularity
-