Compound and consecutive drought-flood events at a global scale

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Flooding during or after droughts poses significant challenges to disaster risk management. However, interactions between droughts and floods are often overlooked as studies typically analyse these events in isolation. Here we explore historical occurrences of compound and consecutive drought-flood events and drought effects on flood severity and timing by analysing global datasets of hydrometeorological and biophysical variables for 8255 catchments worldwide. These data show that 24% of floods globally (anomalies above the 85th percentile) are preceded by, or happen during, drought conditions. Flood events occurring during drought conditions are typically of lower magnitude, especially in arid regions, while floods following drought events have a severity distribution comparable to single flood events. For most drought-flood events, flood timing appears relatively unaffected by drought conditions, but almost a quarter of the drought-flood events had flood timings occurring two to three months later than expected. These shifts in flood timing suggest droughts potentially affect flood-generating processes. As both drought and flood occurrences are projected to increase in a warming climate, interactions between them may become more common and need to be accounted for in flood risk assessment and management.

Original languageEnglish
Article number064048
Pages (from-to)1-12
Number of pages12
JournalEnvironmental Research Letters
Volume19
Issue number6
Early online date29 May 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd

Funding

The authors acknowledge support by the PerfectSTORM ERC Grant Project (Number: ERC-2020-StG-948601, Granted to A F V L). P J W and M C d R received support from the MYRIAD-EU project (Grant Agreement Number 101003276). M M received support from the EU Horizon 2020 project CLIMAAX (Climate Risk Assessments for Every European Region) under Grant Agreement 101093864. We thank SURF (www.surf.nl) and T Tiggeloven for the support in using the National Supercomputer Snellius. We thank M H J van Huijgevoort for the support in implementing the combined variable threshold method.

FundersFunder number
SURF
M H J van Huijgevoort
PerfectSTORM ERCERC-2020-StG-948601
MYRIAD-EU101003276
Horizon 2020101093864
Horizon 2020

    Keywords

    • consecutive/compound
    • drought-flood
    • flood timing
    • global analysis
    • observation data

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