European floods becoming more frequent

The recurrence of major floods in parts of Western and European are shifting from 1-in-100 year events to 1-in-50 year events, according to Evo Banovshy, director the risk management group at Intermap.

Banovshy presented Intermap, a company that collects radar elevation data that is used to create flood maps, during an Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction webinar.

To arrive at this conclusion that a 1-in-100 year flood event could occur every 50 years, he said the company examined the elevation data available to them — in this particular case, they referred to a river in Northern Italy — and combined it with rainfall data from the past 30 or 40 years. “Then you take a global climate change model and you extrapolate the rainfall information another 100 years,” he said.

“So you create, based on a climate change model, an estimated data set for the next 100 years.” The set of information is then inputted into the flood model in decade-long intervals. “You will see the intensity of the events will decrease a little bit, but the frequency will increase.”