A harmonised European database of flood impacts derived from satellite observations

Reliable and spatially consistent information on flood impacts is essential for understanding recent flood risk patterns and supporting risk assessment and management across Europe. However, existing flood impact databases are often fragmented, rely on heterogeneous documentary sources, and provide limited spatial detail, particularly for recent years.

In this contribution, we present a harmonised, event-based European database of flood impacts covering the period 2015–2024. The database provides spatially explicit estimates of flood impacts for flood events detected by the Copernicus Global Flood Monitoring (GFM) system within a pixel-based framework. Flood depth maps derived from SAR satellite observations using a JRC-developed algorithm are combined with harmonised exposure datasets, including population, land use, transport networks and critical infrastructure, to derive indicators of economic and social impacts such as flooded area, affected population, exposed assets and estimated direct economic losses.

Impact indicators are computed for each event and aggregated at NUTS2 administrative level, enabling harmonised regional-scale assessments across Europe. Although individual event-level estimates are subject to uncertainty, the uniform treatment of events allows robust interpretation of relative spatial and temporal patterns of flood impacts.

The results highlight pronounced interannual variability and strong spatial heterogeneity of flood impacts, illustrating that similar numbers of flood events can lead to substantially different impact outcomes depending on their location and affected assets. By providing a systematic, measurement-based perspective on recent flood impacts, this database complements existing documentary-based datasets and offers a valuable resource for flood risk research, model evaluation and European-scale risk assessments.