Prof. Lina Stein

Water-related hazards, such as floods and droughts, threaten societies and ecosystems alike, as exemplified by the still ongoing impacts of the 2021 Ahrtal flood. However, water is fundamental to far more than disaster management – it underpins biodiversity studies, climate policy, agriculture, and even financial markets.

To support these diverse applications, we need global, high-resolution data on rainfall, river discharge, soil moisture, groundwater, and land cover. While direct observations are limited, global hydrological models are used to fill these gaps; however, their increasing complexity raises the question of whether they accurately capture the physics of the water cycle. This talk will demonstrate how extreme flood events can act as “stress tests” for these models, revealing systematic misrepresentations of key processes.

Shortcomings in global models are often due to a disconnect between local research and large-scale modelling. However, there is a source of local knowledge that is vastly underexplored so far: scientific articles. Analyzing 300,000 abstracts on floods and droughts reveals valuable insights into research priorities and the availability of local knowledge for improving models and flood risk predictions.