Global snowmelt flood disasters and their impact from 1900 to 2020北大核心CSCD

Under the background of climate warming, the occurrence time, frequency, intensity, and impact of snowmelt flood disasters have changed significantly. Thus, establishing a global snowmelt flood disaster database is particularly important for disaster risk management. With the help of a web crawler, and based on multiple data sources such as natural disaster databases, documents, books, government agency websites, and news media, this study collected relevant information of snowmelt floods and mixed floods and established standards for identifying snowmelt flood events and their disaster impacts based on data from the different sources. Following the screening, sorting, fusion, and integration of snowmelt flood events, a global snowmelt flood disaster dataset containing 579 pieces of data with strong pertinence and reliability was constructed. The temporal and spatial distribution characteristics of global snowmelt flood disasters from 1900 to 2020 were preliminarily analyzed. The results showed that the snowmelt floods were mainly distributed between 30° N and 60° N, with more mixed floods south of 50° N and more snowmelt floods north of 50° N. Spring was the period of highest incidence of snowmelt flood disasters, followed by winter, summer, and autumn, respectively. The snowmelt floods that occurred in spring, autumn, and winter were mainly at 40°~50° N, and the snowmelt floods that occurred in summer were mainly at 30°~40° N. Compared with the snowmelt floods, the mixed floods were more frequent and more destructive, and their frequency increased with climate warming. The results provide a scientific basis for risk prevention and loss assessment of global snowmelt flood disasters. © 2022 Science Press (China).