Search

The coastDat datasets were produced to give a consistent and homogeneous database mainly for assessing weather statistics and climate changes for the recent decades, e.g., in frequencies of extremes for Europe, especially in data sparse regions. The atmospheric parts of these datasets are regional climate reconstructions for the entire European continent, including the Baltic Sea and North Sea and parts of the Atlantic. The simulations were conducted with the regional climate model COSMO-CLM (CCLM). CoastDat2 (Geyer 2014) covers the period 1948-2017 with a horizontal grid size of 0.22 degree in rotated coordinates, and global reanalysis data of NCEP1 were used as forcing and for the application of spectral nudging. CoastDat3 covers the period 1979-2016 with a horizontal grid size of 0.11 degree in rotated coordinates, and global reanalysis data of ERA-Interim were used as forcing and for the application of spectral nudging.In order to also allow a consistent assessment of hydrological changes, we extended these datasets with high resolution river discharge. The discharge was simulated with the recently developed 5 Min. version of the Hydrological discharge (HD) model (Hagemann et al., submitted). Note that for the development of this HD model version, no river specific parameter adjustments were conducted so that the HD model is generally applicable for climate change studies and over ungauged catchments. In our presentation, we evaluate the simulated discharge using various metrics.ReferencesGeyer, B.: High-resolution atmospheric reconstruction for Europe 1948–2012: coastDat2, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 6, 147-164, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-6-147-2014, 2014. Hagemann, S., T. Stacke and H. Ho-Hagemann, High resolution discharge simulations over Europe and the Baltic Sea catchment. Frontiers in Earth Sci., submitted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

River flooding is a common hazard, causing billions of dollars in annual losses. The impacts of floods are shaped by the spatial scale over which different rivers flood simultaneously. We use flood data from several thousand European rivers to demonstrate that the flood synchrony scale – the distance over which multiple rivers flood near-synchronously – far exceeds the size of individual drainage basins, and varies regionally by more than an order of magnitude. We also show that flood synchrony scales have grown by about 50% over the period 1960-2010, and that years with spatially extensive floods tend to follow one another. These findings reveal that flood risks are correlated well beyond the individual drainage basins for which flood hazards are typically assessed and managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]