River Flood

The River Flood index is relevant to hydrological applications, transport, and disaster risk management. This Index is based on 50-year flood recurrence values based on maximum river discharge values for the 50-year return period and is part of the River flood type of the Wet and Dry category of the classification. A higher/lower value indicates reduced/increased river discharge and thus lower/higher River flood risk.

Definition

The River Flood index is the 50-year flood recurrence value based on maximum river discharge. It is estimated from annual daily maximum river discharge using a Gumbel distribution. Other values from several recurrence periods (10, 5 and 2 years) are also shown as complementary information.

Data Sources

The data was assembled on behalf of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) based on climate projections hosted on the C3S Climate Data Store (CDS). The Index data is from a set of 30-year statistics from two hydrological models (forced by eight bias-corrected multi-model simulations from the EURO-CORDEX experiment. The hydrological models are from the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI, E-HYPE model) and Wageningen University (VIC-WUR model). The hydrological simulations have a 5km x 5km resolution and cover scenarios RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. More information about the dataset can be found in the corresponding CDS documentation resources.

Supporting Information

Further information about this application can be found in the ECDE application User Guide and the Data and datasets underpining the ECDE. More information can also be found on other sections of the EEA site:

• The Index based interactive EEA report: Wet and dry - Heavy precipitation and river floods (link).

Data download

The aggregated data shown on the map can be downloaded as csv files.