Complex picture for likelihood of ENSO-driven flood hazard.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 28294113.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms14796 and PMC identifier 5355947.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
El Niño and La Niña events, the extremes of ENSO climate variability, influence river flow and flooding at the global scale. Estimates of the historical probability of extreme (high or low) precipitation are used to provide vital information on the likelihood of adverse impacts during extreme ENSO events. However, the nonlinearity between precipitation and flood magnitude motivates the need for estimation of historical probabilities using analysis of hydrological data sets. Here, this analysis is undertaken using the ERA-20CM-R river flow reconstruction for the twentieth century. Our results show that the likelihood of increased or decreased flood hazard during ENSO events is much more complex than is often perceived and reported; probabilities vary greatly across the globe, with large uncertainties inherent in the data and clear differences when comparing the hydrological analysis to precipitation.