In the June of 2009 central Europe witnessed a rampant rainfall spell that spread across populated areas of the country. High-intensity rainfall caused 3000+ landslides in the southeastern Austrian state of Styria, and property damages worth €10 Million. Elsewhere in Austria, flooding amounted to reparations worth €40 Million. Numerous synoptic-scale studies indicated the presence of a cut-off low over central Europe and excessive moisture convergence behind the extreme event. In a warmer climate change scenario, such an extreme precipitation event may manifest into a more intense event due to the higher water holding capacity of air with increased temperatures, but this reasoning may not be so straightforward considering the complex physics of precipitation, more so in a topographically heterogeneous region such as the GAR (Greater Alpine Region).
The flooding and landslides caused in the region raise an alarm and thus motivate this study whereby we investigate if the rainfall event did become stronger with time due to climate change compared to how it would have been in a counterfactual (climate change free) past. Here we have deployed the CCLM high-resolution regional model coupled with a statistical landslide model to simulate this event (rainfall and landslides) in a pseudo (surrogate) warming scenario. A marked decrease in rainfall intensity is observed in the simulations for a 1 K cooler climate (pre-industrial past) and the consequent landslide risk could reduce by up to 20%. In the future, depending on the changes in rainfall and soil moisture, the area affected during a 2009-type event could grow by 45% at 4 K global warming, although a slight reduction is also possible.
In this novel event-based study, we discuss the results from the lens of attribution perspective - how conditional attribution is much more useful compared to the conventional risk-based approach of attributing extreme events. We develop physical storylines to address the increasing risks of landslides in the region.
How to cite: Mishra, A. N., Maraun, D., Knevels, R., Truhetz, H., Bevacqua, E., Proske, H., Petschko, H., Leopold, P., Brenning, A., Zappa, G., and Schaffer, A.: Storylines: A severe rainfall-landslide event in Past, Present & Future climate scenarios, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-313, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-313, 2022.
