A High-Resolution Flood Hazard Modelling of the Po River Basin With a Global Hydrological and Water Resources Model (PCR-GLOBWB 2)

The most highly impacting natural disaster in Europe is flooding, which results in fatalities and significant financial damage. Because catastrophic flood occurrences are solely a result of extreme weather, climate change is anticipated to have a significant impact on the severity and frequency of large floods. While the European Joint Research Center has approximated large-scale analyses of flood risk scenarios, the understanding of the consequences at lower sizes is limited or lacking, with few localized research. The techniques continue to be coarse and inconsistent. The approach of this study begins with defining flood frequency analysis, flood hazards and different flood maps. Then, using the global hydrological model PCR-GLOBWB 2.0, daily discharges are simulated for Po river in Italy and floods with a return period of 100 years are calculated using Gumbel distribution. Our result showed a good match between the simulated river discharges and real observations. Results also revealed a Gumbel distribution would be a good model to fit and predict floods with return period of 100 year. As future perspective, the employed methodology can also be extended to a larger scale and finer resolution.