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Effect of climatic oscillations on flood occurrence on Papaloapan River, México, during the 1550–2000 period

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Abstract

This study presents a chronology of historical and measured flood events in the Papaloapan River basin of Mexico during 450 years. Twenty-eight historical floods were recorded during the period 1550–1948 on this river and one flood event (1969) in the instrumental era (1949–2000), of which 14 were extraordinary floods and only 15 were catastrophic ones. There were several flood-rich decades during 1860–1870, 1880–1890, 1920–1930 and 1940–1950. Wavelet analysis found a significant flooding periodicity of 58 years. The wavelet coherence analysis found that flooding had an in-phase relationship with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and also with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Logistic regression corroborated that there exists a positive relationship between floods events and these two natural climatic oscillations. The logistic regression model predicted correctly 92% of flood events.

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Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank Virginia Garcia, Antonio Escobar and Octaviano Corro (Ɨ), for their data used in this work, Aslak Grinsted for his software code to compute the wavelet analysis, and Fabien Lemaitre for his software code to compute the Lang’s test for homogeneity. Conflict of interest: none. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. I would like to thank the Universidad Juarez Autónoma de Tabasco for giving me the time dedicated to carry out this work.

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Correspondence to Arturo Valdés-Manzanilla.

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Valdés-Manzanilla, A. Effect of climatic oscillations on flood occurrence on Papaloapan River, México, during the 1550–2000 period. Nat Hazards 94, 167–180 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-018-3379-8

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