Abstract
Assessments of present and future flood hazard are often limited by the scarcity and short time span of the instrumental time series. In pursuit of documenting the occurrence and magnitude of pre-instrumental flood events, the field of paleoflood hydrology emerged during the second half of the 20th century. Historically, this field has mainly been developed on the identification and dating of flood evidence in fluvial sedimentary archives. In the last two decades, paleoflood hydrology approaches have also been deployed to investigate past floods contained in other natural archives. This article reviews major methodological and technological advancements in the study of lake sediments with the aim to showcase new, robust and continuous paleoflood series. Methodological advancements of flood archives such as tree rings and speleothems are also addressed. The recent developments in these fields have resulted in a growing paleoflood community that opens for cross-disciplinary analysis and synthesis of large data sets to meet the pressing scientific challenges in understanding changes in flood frequency and magnitude.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-8 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Water Security |
| Volume | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - May 2018 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
The ‘ Cross-community workshop on past flood variability ’ was the first meeting of the PAGES Floods Working Group (Grenoble, France, June 27-30, 2016) and it has been generously supported by PAGES, Labex OSUG@2020 (Investissements d’avenir – ANR10 LABX56), European Geosciences Union, Grenoble-INP and Université Grenoble Alpes. PAGES is supported by the US National Science Foundation and the Swiss Academy of Sciences. The open Floods Working Group aims to provide an ideal platform to bring together researchers from the growing community reconstructing past floods (e.g. historians, geographers, geologists) and to promote collaborations with those studying current and future floods (e.g. hydrologists, modelers, statisticians, etc.). The overall goals of the working group are to coordinate, synthesize and promote data and results on the natural variability of floods. Structure, actions and deliverable of the Floods Working Group are detailed in a open-access White Paper (PAGES Floods Working Group, 2017). Juan Pablo Corella currently holds a Juan de la Cierva – Incorporación postdoctoral contract funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (ref IJCI-2015-23839). The CT-scan imagery presented in Fig. 1 was created using a ProCon CT-Alpha Core at EARTHLAB (NRC 226171), University of Bergen. The authors are very grateful to the Editor Bruno Merz for the invitation to prepare and submit this manuscript and to Daniel Schillereff and the anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Juan de la Cierva – Incorporación | |
| Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness | IJCI-2015-23839 |
| US National Science Foundation | |
| National Science Foundation | 1440015 |
| Akademie der Naturwissenschaften |
Keywords
- Advances
- Challenges
- Field history
- Flood hazard
- Natural archives
- Paleoflood hydrology