Deadly flooding in Central Europe made twice as likely by climate change

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Human-caused climate change doubled the likelihood and intensified the heavy rains that led to devastating flooding in Central Europe earlier this month, a new flash study found.

Torrential rain in mid-September from Storm Boris pummeled a large part of central Europe, including Romania, Poland, Czechia, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Germany, and caused widespread damage.

The floods killed 24 people, damaged bridges, submerged cars, left towns without power and in need of significant infrastructure repairs.

The severe four-day rainfall was “by far” the heaviest ever recorded in Central Europe and twice as likely because of warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, World Weather Attribution, a collection of scientists that run rapid climate attribution studies, said Wednesday from Europe.

Climate change also made the rains between 7% and 20% more intense, the study found.

To test the influence of human-caused climate change, the team of scientists analyzed weather data and used climate models to compare how such events have changed since cooler preindustrial times to today.

Such models simulate a world without the current 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming since preindustrial times, and see how likely a rainfall event that severe would be in such a world.

The study analyzed four-day rainfall events, focusing on the countries that felt severe impacts.

Though the rapid study hasn't been peer-reviewed, it follows scientifically accepted techniques.

“In any climate, you would expect to occasionally see records broken," said Friederike Otto, an Imperial College, London, climate scientist who coordinates the attribution study team. B

ut, “to see records being broken by such large margins, that is really the fingerprint of climate change. And that is only something that we see in a warming world.”

Some of the most severe impacts were felt in the Polish-Czech border region and Austria, mainly in urban areas along major rivers.

The study noted that the death toll from this month's flooding was considerably lower than during catastrophic floods in the region in 1997 and 2002. Still, infrastructure and emergency management systems were overwhelmed in many cases and will require billions of euros to fix.

The World Weather Attribution group launched in 2015 largely due to frustration that it took so long to determine whether climate change was behind an extreme weather event.

Studies like theirs, within attribution science, use real-world weather observations and computer modeling to determine the likelihood of a particular happening before and after climate change, and whether global warming affected its intensity.