By Elisa Jiménez Alonso
As climate change progresses, typically used flood risk assessment approaches become more and more obsolete. These are based on historical flood information and are quickly losing relevance as predictors of flood risk. Now, researchers from the University of Adelaide, Australia, have devised a method that is set to significantly increase the speed of highly accurate flood risk predictions.
Another method to predict flood events under climate change, known as continuous simulation, tends to be a slow process due to using long-term rainfall sequences spanning centuries, taking into account climate variability and impacts on catchment processes. However, the new method, known as hybrid causative events, or HCE, gets rid of all unnecessary data such as dry periods without rain. Instead, the method focuses on causative events like high catchment saturation and extreme rainfall events. This reduces the time for modelling dramatically without compromising accuracy.