River channel change can affect flood hazard and impact substantially
Laurence Hawker, Stephen E Darby, Louise Slater, Daniel R Parsons, Richard J Boothroyd, Philip J Ashworth, Hannah Cloke, Pauline Delorme, Solomon H Gebrechorkos, Helen Griffith, Yukiko Hirabayashi, Julian Leyland, Yinxue Liu, Stuart J McLelland, Jeffrey Neal, Andrew P Nicholas, Greg Sambrook Smith, · 2026
Read River channel change can affect flood hazard and impact substantially by Laurence Hawker, Stephen E Darby, Louise Slater, Daniel R Parsons, Richard J Boothroyd, Philip J Ashworth, Hannah Cloke, Pauline Delorme, Solomon H Gebrechorkos, Helen Griffith, Yukiko Hirabayashi, Julian Leyland, Yinxue Liu, Stuart J McLelland, Jeffrey Neal, Andrew P Nicholas, Greg Sambrook Smith, (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13349851.txt.
Description
Laurence Hawker, Stephen E Darby, and a large team of co-authors show that flood models go wrong when they ignore how river channels change shape. Their 2026 study notes that more than a billion people face flood risk today, a figure set to double by 2050. Most global flood models assume each river's bankfull capacity, the flow it holds before spilling, matches a fixed two year flood.
Using a global flood model on the Mississippi basin, the team swapped in bankfull values measured from real channels. Present day bankfull flows mostly matched floods more frequent than yearly. Flooded area was then underestimated by 9 to 152 percent, and people exposed by 15 to 472 percent, across rare and common events. Past channel change alone shifted impacts as much as other known factors.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Laurence Hawker, Stephen E Darby, Louise Slater, Daniel R Parsons, Richard J Boothroyd, Philip J Ashworth, Hannah Cloke, Pauline Delorme, Solomon H Gebrechorkos, Helen Griffith, Yukiko Hirabayashi, Julian Leyland, Yinxue Liu, Stuart J McLelland, Jeffrey Neal, Andrew P Nicholas, Greg Sambrook Smith, |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 46 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |