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Initiatives for better preventing, predicting and managing catastrophic floods in the future

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Image: Edith Oosenbrug

In the last decade the European Commission has launched around 50 projects in the area of preventing, predicting and managing catastrophic floods at a cost of some 58 million euro.
Whether or not climate change is to blame for an increase in flood events in Europe, as some scientists have suggested, it is clear than many interlinked factors determine the extent of the damage that floods can cause. Climate, hydrology, land use, flood defences, preparedness and warning systems all play a role, and must be taken into account when carrying out research in this field.
The first major EU initiative presented in Dresden was aimed at improving the hydrologic data on floods which are so vital for the prediction and prevention of disasters. The SPHERE project applied paleohydrological techniques in order to gather information on extreme floods going back as far as 10,000 years. When combined with historic flood data and more recent instrumental observational data, the resulting flood record can be used to predict extreme events and validate climate change theories far more accurately than short term data alone.
Similarly, the aim of the EURAINSAT project within the 5th Framework Programme is also to take a much broader view of floods in Europe, this time from space. The project was conceived to develop new rainfall estimation techniques using a constellation of low Earth orbit and geostationary satellites. This has resulted in the creation of new cloud classification techniques, which can quantify the rain potential of an individual cloud, and improved data for hydrological forecasting based on real time rainfall algorithms.
With initiatives such as SPHERE and EURAINSAT, as well as the European flood alert system (EFAS) currently being developed, the hope is that this research effort will offer more protection the next time the waters begin to rise.
Source: Euresearch

Categories

  • Extreme events
  • Flood
  • Prevention