Title: Impact of climate change on European winter and summer flood losses

Abstract

Climate change is expected to alter European floods and associated economic losses in various ways. Here we investigate the impact of precipitation change on European average winter and summer financial losses due to flooding under a 1.5 °C warming scenario (reflecting a projected climate in the year 2115 according to RCP2.6)and for a counterfactual current-climate scenario where the climate has evolved without anthropogenic influence (reflecting a climate corresponding to pre-industrial conditions). Climate scenarios were generated with the Community Atmospheric Model (CAM)version 5. For each scenario, we derive a set of weights that when applied to the current climate's precipitation results in a climatology that approximates that of the scenario. We apply the weights to annual losses from a well-calibrated (to the current climate)flood loss model that spans 50,000 years and re-compute the average annual loss to assess the impact of precipitation changes induced by anthropogenic climate change. The method relies on a large stochastic set of physically based flood model simulations and allows quick assessment of potential loss changes due to change in precipitation based on two statistics, namely total precipitation, and total precipitation of very wet days (defined here as the total precipitation of days above the 95th percentilemore » of daily precipitation). We compute the statistics with the raw CAM precipitation and bias-corrected precipitation. Our results show that for both raw and bias-corrected statistics i)average flood loss in Europe generally tend to increase in winter and decrease in summer for the future scenario, and consistent with that change we also show that ii)average flood losses have increased (decreased)for winter (summer)from pre-industrial conditions to the current day. Finally, the magnitude of the change varies among scenarios and statistics chosen.« less

Authors:

Sassi, Maximiliano ^[1]; Nicotina, Ludovico ^[1]; Pall, Pardeep ^[2]; Stone, Dáithí  ^[3];

• Search DOE PAGES for author "Stone, Dáithí"
• Search DOE PAGES for ORCID "0000-0002-2518-100X"

Hilberts, Arno  ^[1];

• Search DOE PAGES for author "Hilberts, Arno"
• Search DOE PAGES for ORCID "0000-0003-2329-6724"

Wehner, Michael ^[4]; Jewson, Stephen ^[1]

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+ Show Author Affiliations

1. Risk Management Solutions Inc., London (United Kingdom)
2. Univ. of Oslow (Norway)
3. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Global Climate Adaptation Partnership, Oxford (United Kingdom)
4. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)

Publication Date:

Tue May 21 00:00:00 EDT 2019

Research Org.:

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER) (SC-23), Climate and Environmental Sciences Division (SC-23.1 ); USDOE

OSTI Identifier:

1580890

Alternate Identifier(s):

OSTI ID: 1528636

Grant/Contract Number:  

AC02-05CH11231

Resource Type:

Accepted Manuscript

Journal Name:

Advances in Water Resources

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Volume: 129; Journal Issue: C; Journal ID: ISSN 0309-1708

Publisher:

Elsevier

Country of Publication:

United States

Language:

English

Subject:

58 GEOSCIENCES; 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; climate change; Paris agreement; flood risk; economic loss; anthropogenic climate change; stochastic precipitation; average flood loss; RCP2.6