Development of a flood events database for the Spanish Mediterranean coast and its application to improve flood risk awareness

Floods are the natural risk that causes the most damage in Mediterranean coastal areas. In Spain, for instance, more than 60% of disaster compensations correspond to floods. Consequently, it is essential to characterize these phenomena to obtain information that can be useful to improve preparedness and future response by generating effective and efficient adaptation strategies.

In the context of the C3RiskMed project, all the flood events that have affected the Spanish Mediterranean coast between 1980 and 2020 have been identified. To this aim, the INUNGAMA flood database (Llasat et al., 2014) has been used as starting point. This database contains all the flood events that have occurred in Catalonia since 1900 and includes hydrometeorological and impact information for each event.  Once this database has been updated until 2020, flood events from the Valencian Community, the Region of Murcia and Mediterranean Andalusia have been searched and classified. This has been achieved by using the Civil Protection Catalog of Historical Floods and other sources such as newspaper archives and reports. This base allows us to characterize the different regions in terms of the impact of events and to identify differences and commonalities to take into account in the design of adaptation measures. It will be also used to identify and characterize compound events.

Hence, in this communication we present the update of this database as well as its application as an adaptation tool for Catalonia: the AGORA Flood Observatory. This Observatory consists of an online portal (agora.ub.edu) that contains multiple resources related to floods such as reports of historical events with different sections adjusted to different target audiences (i.e. the general population, schools, expert and/or technical audiences). This observatory also includes the AGORA viewer. This viewer allows interactive consultation of flood events by municipality, county, and river basin, either on a map or in a table (with event details). The observatory also offer technical and pedagogical material about floods for different target groups. The role of this Observatory as an adaptation tool is based on its potential as a decision support and planning tool and its contribution to the improvement of risk awareness of the population. This research has been done in the framework of the C3Riskmed project (MICINN-AEI/PID2020-113638RB-C22) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the AGORA project financed by the Water Catalan Agency.

Llasat, M.C., Marcos, R., Llasat-Botija, M., et al. (2014). Flash flood evolution in North-Western Mediterranean. Atmospheric Research, 149: 230–243.