The catastrophic floods in the Guadiana River basin since 1500 CE

Abstract

The task of retrieving information about past flood events is very important to reconstruct flood series data. In this work, a wide range of different sources including newspapers, technical reports, and books was consulted in order to recover information about catastrophic flood events in Badajoz (Spain). A set of 37 catastrophic floods of the Guadiana River that occurred in Badajoz in the winter months (DJFM - December, January, February, and March) have been recovered since 1500 CE. This strong seasonality constrain is due to the important influence of the large-scale circulation patterns in winter affecting the climate of the Iberian Peninsula. Moreover, it is found that there is a clear difference between a higher number of floods in the 19th and 20th centuries and a substantial lower value of floods in the 16th–18th centuries. Finally, we evaluated the long-term evolution and inter-annual variability of the precipitation and the main large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns that govern climate variability in Iberia (NAO and EA modes) for the period 1851–1985. This analysis suggests that most extreme floods observed in this period (26 events) correspond to consecutive months with higher than usual precipitation, driven in part by unusual values of both the NAO and the EA modes of variability.