Spatial counterfactuals to explore disastrous flooding

Bruno Merz, Viet Dung Nguyen, B. Guse, Li Han, Xiaoxiang Guan, Oldrich Rakovec, Luis Samaniego, Bodo Ahrens, Sergiy Vorogushyn
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Abstract

Flood-prone people and decision-makers are often unwilling to discuss and prepare for exceptional events, as such events are hard to perceive and out of experience for most people. Once an exceptional flood occurs, affected people and decision-makers are able to learn from this event and improve their preparedness and risk management. However, this learning is often focussed narrowly on the specific disaster experienced, thus missing an opportunity to explore and prepare for even more severe, or different, events. We propose spatial counterfactual floods as a means to motivate society to discuss exceptional events and suitable risk management strategies. We generate a set of extreme floods across Germany by shifting observed rainfall events in space and then propagating these shifted fields through a flood model. We argue that it is highly plausible that the storm tracks that caused past floods could have been shifted by several tens of km in space. The set of spatial counterfactual floods generated in this way contains events which are more than twice as severe as the most disastrous flood since 1950 in Germany. Moreover, regions that have been spared from havoc in the past should not feel safe, as they could have been badly hit as well. We propose spatial counterfactuals as a suitable approach to overcome society's unwillingness to think about and prepare for exceptional floods expected to occur more frequently in a warmer world.
探索灾难性洪灾的空间反事实模型
洪水易发人群和决策者往往不愿意讨论和准备应对特殊事件,因为对大多数人来说,这种事件难以察觉,也不在他们的经验范围之内。一旦发生特大洪灾,受影响的人们和决策者就能够从这次事件中吸取教训,改进他们的准备工作和风险管理。然而,这种学习往往局限于所经历的具体灾难,从而错失了探索和准备应对更严重或不同事件的机会。我们提出了空间反事实洪水,以此来激励社会讨论特殊事件和合适的风险管理战略。我们通过在空间中移动观测到的降雨事件,然后通过洪水模型传播这些移动的雨场,从而在德国各地生成一系列极端洪水。我们认为,造成过去洪灾的暴雨轨迹在空间上移动几十公里是非常有可能的。以这种方式生成的空间反事实洪水集包含的事件,其严重程度是德国 1950 年以来最严重洪水的两倍多。此外,过去幸免于难的地区也不应该感到安全,因为它们也可能遭受重创。我们建议将空间反事实作为一种合适的方法,以克服社会不愿考虑和准备应对预计在气候变暖的世界中会更频繁发生的特殊洪水的问题。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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