HANZE catalogue of modelled and historical floods in Europe, 1950-2020

The HANZE dataset covers riverine, pluvial, coastal and compound floods that have occurred in 42 European countries. It contains:

• 2521 historical floods with impact data (1870-2020);
• 237 further historical floods with significant impacts, but without precise impact data (1950-2020)
• Nearly 15,000 modelled floods with a potential to cause significant impacts, classified by actual historical occurrence or non-occurrence impacts (1950-2020).

Historical floods and the classification of modelled floods was completed by extensive data-collection from more than 900 sources ranging from news reports through government databases to scientific papers. Impact data collected or modelled include area inundated, fatalities, persons affected or economic loss. Economic losses were inflation- and exchange-rate adjusted to 2020 value of the euro. The historical catalogue (lsit A) also includes losses in the original currencies and price levels. The spatial footprint of affected areas is consistently recorded using more than 1400 subnational units corresponding, with minor exceptions, to the European Union’s Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS), level 3. Apart from the possibility to download the data, the database can be viewed, filtered and visualized online: https://naturalhazards.eu. 

The dataset contains the following files (CSV comma-delimited, UTF8, and ESRI shapefiles in zipped folders):

HANZE_historical_floods_catalogue_listA.csv - historical floods with impact data (1870-2020)

HANZE_historical_floods_catalogue_listB.csv - historical floods without impact data (1950-2020)

HANZE_potential_flood_catalogue_all.csv - modelled potential floods (1950-2020)

HANZE_list_of_references.csv - List of all references used in the catalogues

HANZE_model_completness_analysis.csv - Comparison between modelled and reported footprints of historical floods

Regions_v2010_simplified.zip - Map of subnational regions (v2010)

Regions_v2021_simplified.zip - Map of subnational regions (regions v2021)

v1.1: errors in two records in "HANZE_historical_floods_catalogue_listB.csv" (wrong country code in event ID 8227 and wrong start date in event ID 8237) were corrected.