Natural hazards in Australia: floods

Floods are caused by a number of interacting factors, making it remarkably difficult to explain changes in flood hazard. This paper reviews the current understanding of historical trends and variability in flood hazard across Australia. Links between flood and rainfall trends cannot be made due to the influence of climate processes over a number of spatial and temporal scales as well as landscape changes that affect the catchment response. There are also still considerable uncertainties in future rainfall projections, particularly for sub-daily extreme rainfall events. This is in addition to the inherent uncertainty in hydrological modelling such as antecedent conditions and feedback mechanisms. Climatic Change DOI 10.1007/s10584-016-1689-y This article is part of a Special Issue on BThe effect of historical and future climate changes on natural hazards in Australia^ edited by Seth Westra, Chris White and Anthony Kiem. * Fiona Johnson [email protected] 1 UNSW Water Research Centre, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNSW, Sydney, Australia 2 School of Engineering and ICT, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia 3 Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia 4 Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 5 Land and Water, Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation, Canberra, Australia 6 Climate Change Research Centre & ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, UNSW, Sydney, Australia 7 Environment and Research Division, Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Australia 8 Centre for Water, Climate and Land Use (CWCL), Faculty of Science and IT, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia 9 School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia 10 School of Plant Biology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia 11 Present address: Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen K, Denmark Research questions are posed based on the current state of knowledge. These include a need for high-resolution climate modelling studies and efforts in compiling and analysing databases of sub-daily rainfall and flood records. Finally there is a need to develop modelling frameworks that can deal with the interaction between climate processes at different spatio-temporal scales, so that historical flood trends can be better explained and future flood behaviour understood.