CUFED: A multi-scale urban flood event dataset for China (2005–2024) derived from News reports

CUFED contains 3,019 event-level urban flood records covering 31 provincial-level administrative units in China from 1 January 2005 to 31 December 2024. The records were derived from publicly accessible news reports through spatiotemporal–semantic aggregation and were manually checked for consistency in event boundaries, temporal attributes, spatial descriptions, flood-type classifications, and reported impacts.

Each event is assigned a unique and stable identifier in the Event_ID field, ranging sequentially from E00000001 to E00003019.

The repository contains two main types of data:

1.   Flood-event attribute table. Each record includes the event ID, start date, end date, duration, affected prefecture-level cities and county-level units, flood type, affected population, direct economic loss, and number of associated news reports. Flood types are classified as rainfall-induced, snowmelt-induced, storm surge-induced, or compound floods. Affected population is expressed in units of 10,000 people, and economic loss is expressed in units of 100 million CNY. Unavailable values are encoded as NA.

2.   Multi-source supplementary data for eight representative events. These data include flood-inundation extents, nighttime-light indicators, and precipitation data. The files for each representative event are organized and named using the corresponding Event_ID, enabling linkage with the flood-event attribute table.

CUFED supports analyses of the temporal and spatial distribution of urban floods, flood types, reported disaster impacts, event processes, socioeconomic disruption, and post-disaster recovery. The repository provides derived event-level data and does not redistribute the underlying copyrighted news texts.