The Course

The HydroEurope course in winter semester 2025/26 is a joint teaching activity as spin-off of the Erasmus cooperative partnership project
HydroEurope (https://hydroeurope.upc.edu)
using teaching units on different flash flood aspects such as 

• Accidental Water Pollution, 

• Uncertainties in Advanced Hydrological and Hydraulic Modelling and 

• Climate Change Impacts on Flash Floods 

for different case studies in Europe.
HydroEurope is based on team work to deal with the complex flash flood processes and problems. Five teams with 4-5 students each form different partners are composite in this project course. Each team is dealing with one of the five case study and one specific modelling aspect for this case study.
Team 1: La Toreda climate change aspects Barcelona
Team 2: Ahr hydrology rainfall pattern  Cottbus 
Team 3: Pandun Burn uncertainties in modelling Newcastle
Team 4:   Var/Vesubie hydraulic flood modelling Nice
Team 5: Upper Skawa  groundwater Warsaw

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 course 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.