ALBERT

Description: As the negative impacts of hydrological extremes increase in large parts of the world, a better understanding of the drivers of change in risk and impacts is essential for effective flood and drought risk management and climate adaptation. However, there is a lack of comprehensive, empirical data about the processes, interactions and feedbacks in complex human-water systems leading to flood and drought impacts. To fill this gap, we present an IAHS Panta Rhei benchmark dataset containing socio-hydrological data of paired events, i.e. two floods or two droughts that occurred in the same area (Kreibich et al. 2017, 2019). The contained 45 paired events occurred in 42 different study areas (in three study areas we have data on two paired events), which cover different socioeconomic and hydroclimatic contexts across all continents. The dataset is unique in covering floods and droughts, in the number of cases assessed and in the amount of qualitative and quantitative socio-hydrological data contained. References to the data sources are provided in 2022-002_Kreibich-et-al_Key_data_table.xlsx where possible. Based on templates, we collected detailed, review-style reports describing the event characteristics and processes in the case study areas, as well as various semi-quantitative data, categorised into management, hazard, exposure, vulnerability and impacts. Sources of the data were classified as follows: scientific study (peer-reviewed paper and PhD thesis), report (by governments, administrations, NGOs, research organisations, projects), own analysis by authors, based on a database (e.g. official statistics, monitoring data such as weather, discharge data, etc.), newspaper article, and expert judgement. The campaign to collect the information and data on paired events started at the EGU General Assembly in April 2019 in Vienna and was continued with talks promoting the paired event data collection at various conferences. Communication with the Panta Rhei community and other flood and drought experts identified through snowballing techniques was important. Thus, data on paired events were provided by professionals with excellent local knowledge of the events and risk management practices.

Description: Risk management has reduced vulnerability to floods and droughts globally1,2, yet their impacts are still increasing3. An improved understanding of the causes of changing impacts is therefore needed, but has been hampered by a lack of empirical data4,5. On the basis of a global dataset of 45 pairs of events that occurred within the same area, we show that risk management generally reduces the impacts of floods and droughts but faces difficulties in reducing the impacts of unprecedented events of a magnitude not previously experienced. If the second event was much more hazardous than the first, its impact was almost always higher. This is because management was not designed to deal with such extreme events: for example, they exceeded the design levels of levees and reservoirs. In two success stories, the impact of the second, more hazardous, event was lower, as a result of improved risk management governance and high investment in integrated management. The observed difficulty of managing unprecedented events is alarming, given that more extreme hydrological events are projected owing to climate change

Description: Drought estimates in terms of physically measurable variables such as precipitation deficit or streamflow deficit are key knowledge for an effective water management. How these deficits vary with the drought event severity indicated by commonly used standardized monitoring indices is often unclear. In order to study the variation of deficits with indexed severity, we compare precipitation and streamflow deficits for different index-derived drought characteristics in two case study catchments. More specifically, the analysis relies on a frequency analysis with the total probability theorem to the drought characteristics of a certain drought type. Intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves in terms of precipitation and water deficits for the most severe drought of each drought duration in each year are then subject to the comparison of statistical characteristics of droughts for different return periods. Precipitation and streamflow data from two catchments, the Seyhan River (Turkey) and the Kocher River (Germany) provide examples for two climatically and hydrologically different cases. They allow assessing the IDF curve based on differences in drought characteristics between the two variables and between the two catchments. We found that precipitation and streamflow deficits vary systematically reflecting seasonality and amount of precipitation and flow characteristics of the region and catchment. Deficits also change from one month to another at a given station. Higher precipitation deficits were observed in the winter months compared to the summer months in Seyhan. The seasonal variability of precipitation deficit was not that pronounced in Kocher. The maximum streamflow deficits were observed in spring in Seyhan whereas they were observed in winter in Kocher. The deficit-IDF curves converge to an asymptotic value as drought duration increases. The asymptotic value is practically the same for all return periods greater than 25-years, for the two variables and in the two catchments, limiting the meaningfulness of IDF curves for return periods longer than 25 years at long drought durations. The comparison reveals differences in the interpretability of indexed severities in different climatic and hydrological settings. Overall, the IDF curve approach might help end-users such as decision-makers to better understand the drought as an accumulated precipitation or streamflow deficit event.

Description: As the adverse impacts of hydrological extremes increase in many regions of the world, a better understanding of the drivers of changes in risk and impacts is essential for effective flood and drought risk management and climate adaptation. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive, empirical data about the processes, interactions, and feedbacks in complex human–water systems leading to flood and drought impacts. Here we present a benchmark dataset containing socio-hydrological data of paired events, i.e. two floods or two droughts that occurred in the same area. The 45 paired events occurred in 42 different study areas and cover a wide range of socio-economic and hydro-climatic conditions. The dataset is unique in covering both floods and droughts, in the number of cases assessed and in the quantity of socio-hydrological data. The benchmark dataset comprises (1) detailed review-style reports about the events and key processes between the two events of a pair; (2) the key data table containing variables that assess the indicators which characterize management shortcomings, hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and impacts of all events; and (3) a table of the indicators of change that indicate the differences between the first and second event of a pair. The advantages of the dataset are that it enables comparative analyses across all the paired events based on the indicators of change and allows for detailed context- and location-specific assessments based on the extensive data and reports of the individual study areas. The dataset can be used by the scientific community for exploratory data analyses, e.g. focused on causal links between risk management; changes in hazard, exposure and vulnerability; and flood or drought impacts. The data can also be used for the development, calibration, and validation of socio-hydrological models. The dataset is available to the public through the GFZ Data Services (Kreibich et al., 2023, https://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.4.4.2023.001).

Description: As the negative impacts of hydrological extremes increase in large parts of the world, a better understanding of the drivers of change in risk and impacts is essential for effective flood and drought risk management and climate adaptation. However, there is a lack of comprehensive, empirical data about the processes, interactions and feedbacks in complex human-water systems leading to flood and drought impacts. To fill this gap, we present an IAHS Panta Rhei benchmark dataset containing socio-hydrological data of paired events, i.e. two floods or two droughts that occurred in the same area (Kreibich et al. 2017, 2019). The contained 45 paired events occurred in 42 different study areas (in three study areas we have data on two paired events), which cover different socioeconomic and hydroclimatic contexts across all continents. The dataset is unique in covering floods and droughts, in the number of cases assessed and in the amount of qualitative and quantitative socio-hydrological data contained. References to the data sources are provided in 2023-001_Kreibich-et-al_Key_data_table.xlsx where possible. Based on templates, we collected detailed, review-style reports describing the event characteristics and processes in the case study areas, as well as various semi-quantitative data, categorised into management, hazard, exposure, vulnerability and impacts. Sources of the data were classified as follows: scientific study (peer-reviewed paper and PhD thesis), report (by governments, administrations, NGOs, research organisations, projects), own analysis by authors, based on a database (e.g. official statistics, monitoring data such as weather, discharge data, etc.), newspaper article, and expert judgement. The campaign to collect the information and data on paired events started at the EGU General Assembly in April 2019 in Vienna and was continued with talks promoting the paired event data collection at various conferences. Communication with the Panta Rhei community and other flood and drought experts identified through snowballing techniques was important. Thus, data on paired events were provided by professionals with excellent local knowledge of the events and risk management practices.

Description: As the International Association of Hydrological Sciences History of Hydrology Working Group mission notes, there is no readily available source of information about the history of hydrology and hydrologists. In particular, the contributions of marginalized genders in hydrology have been – and continue to be – invisible, overlooked, or disregarded, leaving a gap in efforts to catalog the history of hydrology and hydrologists. Recent efforts to recognize gender diversity in the field have challenged the perceptions that past contributions were non-existent. As examples, the Journal of Hydrology has just finished a special issue titled, “Women in Hydrology,” the journal WIREs Water published a historical perspective on women in limnology, and several U.S. government science agencies have initiatives to honor the contributions of women. To further and expand these ground-breaking efforts, we propose to document contributions by marginalized gender to hydrology dating back to the contributions of indigenous women to the mapping of water resources in the western United States through to the modern period of global hydrology. Using analogous methods from other efforts to uncover these invisible contributions, including interviews with later-career hydrologists and historical accounts of diverse genders that have supported and enabled success in hydrology, we plan to catalog these unique and significant contributions that have shaped our understanding of water. Our work will detail the initial efforts underway and seek to further engage the community this initiative.