Methods for improving pan-European flood risk mapping

In the past decade, there has been growing interest in analysing flood hazard and risk on European scale. Such studies allow assessment of climate change impacts, can be used at EU-level policymaking and provide information on countries where local flood maps are not available. In this thesis, some innovative methodologies that contribute to improvement of pan-European flood mapping are explored. The topics covered include: (1) using Bayesian statistics to reduce time needed to map river flood hazard compared to rainfall-runoff models; (2) computing extreme sea levels and coastal flood hazard zones under present and future climate; (3) adjusting historical flood losses for changes in exposure to reveal true long-term trends in flood losses in Europe; (4) utilizing dependency modelling for assessing the hazard of compound flood occurrence.