A dried up pond in a community in the summer, Hovmantorp, Småland, Sweden.

Photo: Schon / Getty Images

In this paper, the authors present a framework to aid in the selection of optimal environmental indicators for detecting and mapping extreme events and analyzing trends in heatwaves, meteorological and hydrological droughts, foods, and their compound occurrence. The framework uses temperature, precipitation, river discharge, and derived climate indices to characterize the spatial distribution of hazard intensity, frequency, duration, co-occurrence, and dependence.

The relevant climate indices applied are Standardized Precipitation Index, Standardized Precipitation and Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), Standardized Streamflow Index, heatwave indices based on fixed (HWIS) and anomalous temperatures (HWIE), and Daily Flood Index (DFI). The authors selected suitable environmental indicators and corresponding thresholds for each hazard based on estimated extreme event detection performance using receiver operating characteristics (ROC), area under curve (AUC), and accuracy, which is defined as the proportion of correct detections. They assessed compound hazard dependence using a Likelihood Multiplication Factor (LMF).

The researchers tested the framework for the case of Sweden, using daily data for the period 1922–2021. The ROC results showed that HWIS, SPEI12 and DFI are suitable indices for representing heatwaves, droughts, and foods, respectively (AUC > 0.83). Application of these indices revealed increasing heatwave and food occurrence in large areas of Sweden, but no significant change trend for droughts. Hotspots with LMF > 1, mostly concentrated in northern Sweden from June to August, indicated that compound drought-heatwave and drought-food events are positively correlated in those areas, which can exacerbate their impacts.

The novel framework presented in this paper adds to existing hydroclimatic hazard research by (1) using local data and historical records of extremes to validate indicator-based hazard hotspots, (2) evaluating compound hazards at regional scale, (3) being transferable and streamlined, (4) attaining satisfactory performance for indicator-based hazard detection as demonstrated by the ROC method, and (5) being generalizable to various hazard types.

Read the paper

Open access

SEI authors

Marlon Vieira Passos

Research Associate

SEI Headquarters

Jung-Ching Kan

Research Associate

SEI Headquarters

Karina Barquet

Team Leader: Water, Coasts and Ocean; Senior Research Fellow

SEI Headquarters

Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment Open access

Topics and subtopics

Water : Disaster risk

Tags

flooding , drought , hydrology , climate impacts , modelling

Related centres

SEI Headquarters

Regions

Europe , Sweden