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Journal Article

Spatial counterfactuals to explore disastrous flooding

Authors
/persons/resource/bmerz

Merz,  B.
4.4 Hydrology, 4.0 Geosystems, Departments, GFZ Publication Database, Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum;

/persons/resource/dung

Nguyen,  D.
4.4 Hydrology, 4.0 Geosystems, Departments, GFZ Publication Database, Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum;

Guse,  Björn
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/lihan

Han,  Li
4.4 Hydrology, 4.0 Geosystems, Departments, GFZ Publication Database, Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum;

/persons/resource/guan

Guan,  Xiaoxiang
4.4 Hydrology, 4.0 Geosystems, Departments, GFZ Publication Database, Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum;

Rakovec,  Oldrich
External Organizations;

Samaniego,  Luis
External Organizations;

Ahrens,  Bodo
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/vorogus

Vorogushyn,  S.
4.4 Hydrology, 4.0 Geosystems, Departments, GFZ Publication Database, Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum;

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Fulltext (public)

5024990.pdf
(Publisher version), 7MB

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Citation

Merz, B., Nguyen, D., Guse, B., Han, L., Guan, X., Rakovec, O., Samaniego, L., Ahrens, B., Vorogushyn, S. (2024): Spatial counterfactuals to explore disastrous flooding. - Environmental Research Letters, 19, 4, 044022.
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad22b9


Cite as: https://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_5024990
Abstract
Flood-prone people and decision-makers are often unwilling to discuss and prepare for exceptional events, as such events are hard to perceive and out of experience for most people. Once an exceptional flood occurs, affected people and decision-makers are able to learn from this event. However, this learning is often focussed narrowly on the specific disaster experienced, thus missing an opportunity to explore and prepare for even more severe, or different, events. We propose spatial counterfactual floods as a means to motivate society to discuss exceptional events and suitable risk management strategies. We generate a set of extreme floods across Germany by shifting observed rainfall events in space and then propagating these shifted fields through a flood model. We argue that the storm tracks that caused past floods could have developed several tens of km away from the actual tracks. The set of spatial counterfactual floods generated contains events which are more than twice as severe as the most disastrous flood since 1950 in Germany. Moreover, regions that have been spared from havoc in the past should not feel safe, as they could have been badly hit as well. We propose spatial counterfactuals as a suitable approach to overcome society's unwillingness to think about and prepare for exceptional floods expected to occur more frequently in a warmer world.