An interactive app to explore world floods

| 28 March 2021

The Global Streamflow Indices and Metadata Archive describes hydrological regimes all over the World. A subset of around 2000 stations over the period 1903-2016 is used in the HEGS project to study floods at the global scale. In order to get a quick overview of this large dataset, the flood occurrences interactive map shows, for each station, the largest flood for a given season of a given year:

  • circle size is proportional to the flood severity, expressed as a return period (eg 50-year flood, 100-year flood, …).
  • circle color indicates whether the flood is larger than a given threshold.

Seasons refer to those in the Northern Hemisphere; for example Winter is December-January-February.

Using the date selector, some notable large-scale floods appear on the map: Winter 1964 in Western US, Winter 1995 in North America or Winter 2005 in Europe are just a few of them.


Authors: Chloe (interactive app, writing) & Ben (data manipulation, writing)

Codes and data: browse on GitHub