Scientific structure of the research unit and key research questions
Extreme floods are extraordinary in terms of their size, characterised by their peaks, and/or other features, such as volumes, shapes, spatial extent or seasonality which are, in turn, related to the peaks. Floods occur during events, i.e. defined periods of high river discharges. The natural way of analysing floods, therefore, is the event scale. Flood events are imbedded in a regional context of meteorological, landscape and river conditions, so a complementary way of analysing floods are space (regional) scales.
There is also a temporal framing from the atmosphere to the rivers, and predictions at all scales are associated with uncertainties that need to be accounted for. This Research Unit therefore suggests that the most natural and coherent approach of exploring extreme flood processes is along the axes of scales: