Flood and Megaflood Processes and Deposits || Effects of Land-Use and Precipitation Changes on Floodplain Sedimentation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Geul River, The Netherlands)

✍ Scribed by Martini, I. Peter; Baker, Victor R.; Garzn, Guillermina

• Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 467 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 0632064048
• DOI: 10.1002/9781444304299.ch14

✦ Synopsis

Belgium and The Netherlands; Fig. 1a) flooded severely, causing extensive damage and forcing massive evacuations. These events sparked an interest in land-use and climate change as possible causes of the recent, apparent increase in flood frequency. To separate the effects of land-use change and precipitation variability on the peak discharges of the Meuse, one would ideally need single cause-effect relationships for discrete time periods and a long discharge time-series. For a river basin such as the Meuse (33 000 km 2 ) there are no such undisturbed cause-effect relationships, because it is used for international commercial shipping and various other economic purposes, and therefore has been heavily engineered. Generally, peak discharges in the Meuse lead to flooding problems when peak discharges in subcatchments such as the Ourthe and the Sambre (Fig. 1a) coincide with those of the main channel