Future Global Flood Hazards at Unprecedented Accuracy

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: Water Resources Research

Flooding is the most pervasive natural disaster and flood risks are increasing in many parts of the world due to climate change, rapid population growth, and economic activity. This has serious implications for future economic prosperity and societal wellbeing worldwide.

Wing et al. [2024] construct a new global flood hazard map at 30-meter spatial resolution, tackling some of the major theoretical and technical challenges in the existing hydrodynamic modeling. Its high-resolution, multi-peril representation of the current and future flood hazards establishes an updated state of the art in global-scale flood modeling and mapping.

Simulated future global flood hazard maps show that future emissions reduction can hold flood hazards largely constant this century but coastal flooding will increase drastically regardless. These improved global flood hazard maps at unprecedented scale will facilitate the modeling, evaluation, and mitigation of future global flood risks.

Citation: Wing, O. E. J., Bates, P. D., Quinn, N. D., Savage, J. T. S., Uhe, P. F., Cooper, A., et al. (2024). A 30 m global flood inundation model for any climate scenario. Water Resources Research, 60, e2023WR036460. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023WR036460

—Yoshihide Wada, Associate Editor, Water Resources Research

Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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