Holocene shifts in the frequency, magnitude and seasonality of floods across southern Norway

Over the last decades we have witnessed a change in the timing and frequency of river floods in Norway. This change is believed to be spurred by contemporary global warming and calls for an improved understanding of how climate affects the activity of floods in different river systems. A major challenge of flood risk assessment in society is that instrumental data records are too short to capture the full range of long-term natural flood variability. To extend our knowledge of past flood activity beyond instrumental and historical data records we use lake sediments to reconstruct past flood events across southern Norway. Lakes are natural sediment archives, which through various proxies, reveal information about the processes in the catchment over time.

Project period: October 2018 – July 2023

This PhD project is funded by NVE, the University of Bergen, and the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research.