ABSTRACT
Floods continue to be an acute problem, causing much material damage worldwide and considerable death toll. This Chapter reviews changes in floods at a European scale and discusses observed development of climatic drivers. It illustrates changes in maximum precipitation and streamflow, in exposure to floods, and in counts of major floods in Europe, based on different sources of data and for different time intervals. The spatio-temporal analysis of fields of floods shows the geographic distribution of the number of floods over Europe and the changes in flood frequency over five consecutive five-year intervals. The juxtaposition of metrics of exposure and frequency of large flood flow illustrates that flood risk in Romania and Ukraine is particularly high. Several ongoing land-use changes, such as urbanization, deforestation, elimination of natural storage, can be regarded as adverse from the viewpoint of flood safety, resulting in growth of damage potential, and amplification and acceleration of the flood wave.
