Extreme precipitation is thought to increase with warming at rates similar to or greater than the water vapour holding capacity of the air at ~ 7% °C−1, the so-called Clausius–Clapeyron (CC) rate. We present an empirical study of the variability in the rates of increase in precipitation intensity with air temperature using 30 years of 10 min and 1 h data from 59 stations in Switzerland. The analysis is conducted on storm events rather than fixed interval data, and divided into storm type subsets based on the presence of lightning which is expected to indicate convection. The average rates of increase in extremes (95th percentile) of mean event intensity computed from 10 min data are 6.5% °C−1 (no-lightning events), 8.9% °C−1 (lightning events) and 10.7% °C−1 (all events combined). For peak 10 min intensities during an event the rates are 6.9% °C−1 (no-lightning events), 9.3% °C−1 (lightning events) and 13.0% °C−1 (all events combined). Mixing of the two storm types exaggerates the relations to air temperature. Doubled CC rates reported by other studies are an exception in our data set, even in convective rain. The large spatial variability in scaling rates across Switzerland suggests that both local (orographic) and regional effects limit moisture supply and availability in Alpine environments, especially in mountain valleys. The estimated number of convective events has increased across Switzerland in the last 30 years, with 30% of the stations showing statistically significant changes. The changes in intense convective storms with higher temperatures may be relevant for hydrological risk connected with those events in the future.

There has been a surprisingly large number of major floods in the last years around the world, which suggests that floods may have increased and will continue to increase in the next decades. However, the realism of such changes is still hotly discussed in the literature. This overview article examines whether floods have changed in the past and explores the driving processes of such changes in the atmosphere, the catchments and the river system based on examples from Europe. Methods are reviewed for assessing whether floods may increase in the future. Accounting for feedbacks within the human‐water system is important when assessing flood changes over lead times of decades or centuries. It is argued that an integrated flood risk management approach is needed for dealing with future flood risk with a focus on reducing the vulnerability of the societal system. WIREs Water 2015, 2:329–344. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1079This article is categorized under: Science of Water > Water and Environmental Change Science of Water > Water Quality

The aim of this paper is to understand the causal factors controlling the relationship between flood peaks and volumes in a regional context. A case study is performed based on 330 catchments in Austria ranging from 6 to 500 km² in size. Maximum annual flood discharges are compared with the associated flood volumes, and the consistency of the peak–volume relationship is quantified by the Spearman rank correlation coefficient. The results indicate that climate-related factors are more important than catchment-related factors in controlling the consistency. Spearman rank correlation coefficients typically range from about 0.2 in the high alpine catchments to about 0.8 in the lowlands. The weak dependence in the high alpine catchments is due to the mix of flood types, including long-duration snowmelt, synoptic floods and flash floods. In the lowlands, the flood durations vary less in a given catchment which is related to the filtering of the distribution of all storms by the catchment response time to produce the distribution of flood producing storms.

The current work addresses one of the key building blocks towards an improved understanding of flood processes and associated changes in flood characteristics and regimes in Europe: the development of a comprehensive, extensive European flood database. The presented work results from ongoing cross-border research collaborations initiated with data collection and joint interpretation in mind. A detailed account of the current state, characteristics and spatial and temporal coverage of the European Flood Database, is presented. At this stage, the hydrological data collection is still growing and consists at this time of annual maximum and daily mean discharge series, from over 7000 hydrometric stations of various data series lengths. Moreover, the database currently comprises data from over 50 different data sources. The time series have been obtained from different national and regional data sources in a collaborative effort of a joint European flood research agreement based on the exchange of data, models and expertise, and from existing international data collections and open source websites. These ongoing efforts are contributing to advancing the understanding of regional flood processes beyond individual country boundaries and to a more coherent flood research in Europe.