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Use of Systematic, Palaeoflood and Historical Data for the Improvement of Flood Risk Estimation. Review of Scientific Methods

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Abstract

The catastrophic floods recently occurring in Europe warn of the critical need forhydrologic data on floods over long-time scales. Palaeoflood techniques provideinformation on hydrologic variability and extreme floods over long-time intervals(100 to 10,000 yr) and may be used in combination with historical flood data (last1,000 yr) and the gauge record (last 30–50 yr). In this paper, advantages anduncertainties related to the reconstruction of palaeofloods in different geomorphologicalsettings and historical floods using different documentary sources are described.Systematic and non-systematic data can be combined in the flood frequency analysisusing different methods for the adjustment of distribution functions. Technical toolsintegrating multidisciplinary approaches (geologic, historical, hydraulic and statistical)on extreme flood risk assessment are discussed. A discussion on the potential theoreticalbases for solving the problem of dealing with non-systematic and non-stationary data ispresented. This methodology is being developed using new methodological approachesapplied to European countries as a part of a European Commission funded project (SPHERE).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIC-Env. Sciences Centre, Serrano 115 bis, Madrid, Spain

    Gerardo Benito & Varyl Thorndycraft

  2. CEMAGREF, 3 bis quai Chauveau, Lyon cedex 09, France

    Michel Lang

  3. Faculty of Physics, University of Barcelona, Spain

    Mariano Barriendos & M. Carmen Llasat

  4. Univ. Politécnica de Valencia, Apdo. 22012, Spain

    Felix Francés

  5. INRS-Eau, 2800 Einstein, C.P. 7500, Ste-Foy (QC), G1V 4C7, Canada

    Taha Ouarda & Bernard Bobée

  6. Inst. Earth Sciences, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

    Yehouda Enzel

  7. Inst. Für Wasserbau, University of Stuttgart, Germany

    Andras Bardossy

  8. ACTHYS, Irvoy 3, Grenoble, France

    Denis Coeur

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  1. Gerardo Benito
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Benito, G., Lang, M., Barriendos, M. et al. Use of Systematic, Palaeoflood and Historical Data for the Improvement of Flood Risk Estimation. Review of Scientific Methods. Natural Hazards 31, 623–643 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:NHAZ.0000024895.48463.eb

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