Abstract
Floods have profound impacts on populations worldwide in terms of both loss of life and property. A global inventory of floods is an important tool for quantifying the spatial and temporal distribution of floods and for evaluating global flood prediction models. Several global hazard inventories currently exist; however, their utility for spatiotemporal analysis of global floods is limited. The existing flood catalogs either fail to record the geospatial area over which the flood impacted or restrict the types of flood events included in the database according to a set of criteria, limiting the scope of the inventory. To improve upon existing databases, and make it more comprehensive, we have compiled a digitized Global Flood Inventory (GFI) for the period 1998–2008 which also geo-references each flood event by latitude and longitude. This technical report presents the methodology used to compile the GFI and preliminary findings on the spatial and temporal distributions of the flooding events that are contained in the inventory.
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Acknowledgments
This study is supported by NASA Applied Science Global Flood and Landslide Project, NASA SERVIR-Africa Project, and National Science Foundation’s REU award to School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences at the University of Oklahoma. The authors would like to extend their appreciation to many institutions, particularly the EM-DAT and DFO for sharing the flood hazard data for the current study. Similarly, the authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments and suggestion which helped to improve the earlier manuscript.
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Adhikari, P., Hong, Y., Douglas, K.R. et al. A digitized global flood inventory (1998–2008): compilation and preliminary results. Nat Hazards 55, 405–422 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-010-9537-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-010-9537-2