Floods in Mountain Basins
This chapter provides a general introduction to recent research on floods in mountain catchments and reviews state-of-the-art contemporary knowledge on the topic in Poland and Switzerland. The selection of the areas illustrated in this chapter is motivate
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tract This chapter provides a general introduction to recent research on floods in mountain catchments and reviews state-of-the-art contemporary knowledge on the topic in Poland and Switzerland. The selection of the areas illustrated in this chapter is motivated by the fact that the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) had funded a research project on floods in the Polish Tatra Mountains and their forelands, to which this book is also dedicated. Keywords Floods Climate change
Flash floods
Mountain environments
Precipitation
1 Introduction Mountain environments cover roughly 25 % of the land surface and are often referred to as ‘natural water reservoirs’; this is because a substantial amount of water surplus is usually transported from mountain areas to adjacent lowlands in some of the largest river systems on Earth (Viviroli et al. 2003). Mountain regions cover 52 % of Asia, 36 % of North America, 25 % of Europe, 22 % of South America, 17 % of Australia, and 3 % of Africa, as well as substantial areas of islands including Japan, New Guinea, and New Zealand (Bridges 1990). M. Stoffel (&) V. Ruiz-Villanueva J.A. Ballesteros-Cánovas Dendrolab.ch, Institute of Geological Sciences, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] V. Ruiz-Villanueva e-mail: [email protected] J.A. Ballesteros-Cánovas e-mail: [email protected] M. Stoffel V. Ruiz-Villanueva J.A. Ballesteros-Cánovas Climatic Change and Climate Impacts, Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland M. Stoffel Department of Earth Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 Z.W. Kundzewicz et al. (eds.), Flood Risk in the Upper Vistula Basin, GeoPlanet: Earth and Planetary Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41923-7_2
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Floods in mountain basins are often flashy (Borga et al. 2008, 2014), and therefore differ from most other fluvial floods in that the lead time for warnings is generally very limited (e.g., often much less than two hours). Flash floods usually occur in mountain river catchments draining less than 1000 km2 (Gaume and Borga 2008; Lumbroso and Gaume 2012). In these environments, direct current meter measurements are often impossible to conduct during flood peaks for safety and technical reasons (Fukami et al. 2008). One of the greatest difficulties to characterize floods in mountain rivers is that for a given event, several processes coupling between hillslopes and channels may take place concurrently (i.e., debris flows, hyperconcentrated flow, and clear water flow), with different characteristics such as rheology or the number of phases involved (Montgomery and Buffington 1997; Bracken and Croke 2007; Bodoque et al. 2011) Mountain basins often respond rapidly to intense rainfall rates because they have high slopes and a quasi-circular morphology and, as a consequence strong connectivity (Ruiz-Villanueva et al. 2010; Youssef et al. 2011). Likewise, in t
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