The Course

The HydroEurope course in winter semester 2023/24 is a joint teaching activity within the Erasmus cooperative partnership project HydroEurope to evaluate new teaching units on Climate Change Impacts on Flash Floods for six different case studies in Europe. HydroEurope is based on team work to deal with the complex flash flood processes and problems. Two teams with 10-12 students are dealing with one of the six case studies , in total 12 teams are formed in this project course. 

Presentation by Gonzalo Olivares on 17 November

Record of the HydroEurope KickOff Meeting 17 November: 

https://we.tl/t-yvCwiCcG7a of EuroAquae Server BTU

The Topic

According to EU action to climate change adaptation, climate change is expected to lead an increase of precipitation in many areas. Increased rainfall over extended periods will mainly lead to fluvial (river) flooding, while short, intense cloudbursts can cause pluvial floods, where extreme rainfall causes flooding without any body of water overflowing. Climate change is likely to increase the frequency of flooding across Europe in the coming years with flash floods expected to become more frequent across Europe. Flash floods are quick-rising floods are most often caused by heavy rains over a short period (usually six hours or less). It has been observed in the HEIs of the consortium that the current curricula tend to focus on traditional flooding issues and only consider climate change impacts as a afterthought. Thus this work package aims to bring the climate change to the foreground, where the focus will be the climate change impacts on extreme events and its implications on the evolution of floods' behaviors. Therefore it is of importance that the future water engineers are well equipped with the knowledge and experiences in managing flash floods. The target of the HydroEuro project is the production of related innovative teaching units for six case studies in Europe to improve the academic curriculum in hydroinformaics and water management.