Floods and droughts: a multivariate perspective

Abstract. Multivariate or compound hydrological-extreme events such as successive floods, large-scale droughts, consecutive drought-to-flood challenge water management and can be particularly impactful. Still, the multivariate nature of floods droughts is often ignored by studying individual characteristics only, which lead to under- overestimation risk. Studying extremes challenging because variable dependencies they are even less abundant in observational records than univariate extremes. In this review, I discuss different types hydrological their dependencies, including regional affecting multiple locations, spatially connected flood events; occurring close temporal succession, droughts; characterized characteristics, with jointly high peak discharge volume; transitions between extremes, transitions. present strategies describe model assess hazard potential, descriptors distributions return periods, stochastic large-ensemble simulation approaches. The discussed enable a perspective on allows us derive risk estimates for extreme described more one variable.