Assessment of the capacity for flood monitoring and early warning in Enlargement and Eastern/ Southern Neighbourhood countries of the European Union

Flooding is a natural disaster that can damage large areas in the vicinity of rivers, and in the case of flash floods, also in the vicinity of smaller streams. The Global Risks Report 2017 lists extreme weather events, of which flooding is the main risk in most countries, as the risk with the second highest potential impact and the highest likelihood of occurrence. It furthermore seems likely that climate change will aggravate flood impacts in many regions. This report presents an assessment of the capacity for flood monitoring and early flood warning in 17 of the 22 countries which belong to the Eastern and Southern neighbourhood policy of the European Union and the enlargement candidate countries. Many of these receive external funding to improve their systems, but this is often on an ad hoc basis and through individual projects.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

Changing climate both increases and decreases European river floods

Climate change has led to concerns about increasing river floods resulting from the greater water-holding capacity of a warmer atmosphere. These concerns are reinforced by evidence of increasing economic losses associated with flooding in many parts of the world, including Europe. Any changes in river floods would have lasting implications for the design of flood protection measures and flood risk zoning. However, existing studies have been unable to identify a consistent continental-scale climatic-change signal in flood discharge observations in Europe, because of the limited spatial coverage and number of hydrometric stations. Here we demonstrate clear regional patterns of both increases and decreases in observed river flood discharges in the past five decades in Europe, which are manifestations of a changing climate. Our results—arising from the most complete database of European flooding so far—suggest that: increasing autumn and winter rainfall has resulted in increasing floods in northwestern Europe; decreasing precipitation and increasing evaporation have led to decreasing floods in medium and large catchments in southern Europe; and decreasing snow cover and snowmelt, resulting from warmer temperatures, have led to decreasing floods in eastern Europe. Regional flood discharge trends in Europe range from an increase of about 11 per cent per decade to a decrease of 23 per cent. Notwithstanding the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the observational record, the flood changes identified here are broadly consistent with climate model projections for the next century, suggesting that climate-driven changes are already happening and supporting calls for the consideration of climate change in flood risk management

Coastal Sea Level Monitoring in the Mediterranean and Black Seas

Spanning over a century, a traditional way to monitor sea level variability by tide gauges is – in combination with modern observational techniques like satellite altimetry – an inevitable ingredient in sea level studies over the climate scales and in coastal seas. The development of the instrumentation, remote data acquisition, processing and archiving in last decades allowed for extending the applications towards a variety of users and coastal hazard managers. The Mediterranean and Black50 seas are an example for such a transition – while having a long tradition for sea level observations with several records spanning over a century, the number of modern tide gauge stations are growing rapidly, with data available both in real-time and as a research product at different time resolutions. As no comprehensive survey of the tide gauge networks has been carried out recently in these basins, the aim of this paper is to map the existing coastal sea level monitoring infrastructures and the respective data availability. The survey encompasses description of major monitoring networks in the Mediterranean and Black55 seas and their characteristics, including the type of sea level sensors, measuring resolutions, data availability and existence of ancillary measurements, altogether collecting information about 236 presently operational tide gauge stations. The availability of the Mediterranean and Black seas sea level data in the global and European sea level repositories has been also screened and classified following their sampling interval and level of quality-check, pointing to the necessity of harmonization of the data available with different metadata and series at different repositories. Finally, an assessment of the networks’ capabilities60 for their usage in different sea level applications has been done, with recommendations that might mitigate the bottlenecks and assure further development of the networks in a coordinated way, being that more necessary in the era of the human-induced climate changes and the sea level ris

Changing climate shifts timing of European floods

A warming climate is expected to have an impact on the magnitude and timing of river floods; however, no consistent large-scale climate change signal in observed flood magnitudes has been identified so far. We analyzed the timing of river floods in Europe over the past five decades, using a pan-European database from 4262 observational hydrometric stations, and found clear patterns of change in flood timing. Warmer temperatures have led to earlier spring snowmelt floods throughout northeastern Europe; delayed winter storms associated with polar warming have led to later winter floods around the North Sea and some sectors of the Mediterranean coast; and earlier soil moisture maxima have led to earlier winter floods in western Europe. Our results highlight the existence of a clear climate signal in flood observations at the continental scale

Assessment of wildfires forecast performance in Albania: Case study

The harmful impacts of climate change caused by wildfires are substantially harming the people of mainland Europe, as well as damaging species biodiversity and the ecosystem. It can be minimised by improving the effectiveness of fire risk forecasting and mitigation strategies. The aim of this paper was to investigate the accuracy of forest fire forecasts in Albania produced by the FWI (Fire Weather Index) system. During the summer of 2022, observations and data were collected on expected and actual fires in the prefectures of Albania, which were previously divided into four categories according to the level of fire risk: high, moderate, low, and zero. It was determined that, in the summer of 2022, Albania happened a grand total of 620 wildfires. The data were analysed using two indicators: the probability of fire occurrence for a particular prefecture and the number of fires per prefecture. The analysis revealed varying degrees of accuracy in fire predictions across different prefectures, with higher precision observed in high-risk regions but diminishing as the risk level decreased. The most dependable indicator of forecast accuracy, reaching 75%, was observed in high-risk areas during the month of August. Predicting fire localization within moderate-risk zones consistently achieved results above 50% but fell short of the 60% threshold. Overall, the results confirm the effectiveness of using data to predict the probability of fires for prefectures with a high and increased level of the relevant threat. This will make it possible to more effectively deploy and mobilise the resources needed to overcome them and substantially reduce the losses associated with the

Hydropower and climate change, insights from the integrated water-energy modelling of the Drin Basin

The understanding of the transboundary impact of Climate Change on hydropower is not well-established in the literature, where few studies take a system perspective to understand the relative roles of different technological solutions for coordinated water and energy management. This study contributes to addressing this gap by introducing an open-source, long-term, technologically-detailed water and energy resources cost-minimisation model for the Drin River Basin, built in OSeMOSYS.The analysis shows that climate change results in a 15–52% annual decline in hydro generation from the basin by mid-century. Albania needs to triple its investments in solar and wind to mitigate the risk of climate change. Changing the operational rules of hydropower plants has a minor impact on the electricity supply. However, it can spare significant storage volume for flood control