ABSTRACT
Fluvial flood events are exceptionally high river discharges associated with water levels sometimes higher than the river bank and leading to inundations. This chapter presents a European Regional High Flow Catalogue that has been derived from river flow records of nearly 600 catchments across Europe using the new concept of Regional High Flow Index. The regional high flow characteristics of Southeast Great Britain are a mix of those of two distinct subsets of catchments, the groundwater and non-groundwater-dominated catchments of lowland England. Southern France exhibits a marked change in regional high flow occurrence over the 1961–2005 period. Different flood-related indices might be of interest, such as the frequency and severity of floods, number of incidences of independent flood events, or the cumulative departure above a prescribed threshold within a time interval. Spatial coherence in the CT showing the strongest links with flood occurrence was seen to be very variable seasonally.
