![]() The river basin covers an area of around 98,200 km 2 and it mainly includes the territories of Belarus and Lithuania, whereas small parts of this basin fall within Russia (Kaliningrad district), Poland and Latvia ( Figure 1). The Nemunas River is the 14th longest river in Europe and the 4th longest in the Baltic Sea drainage basin. An attempt to quantify multi-continental changes in the frequency and magnitude of extreme floods revealed that the key drivers of extreme floods strongly vary between catchments ( Berghuijs et al. Hence, flood magnitude is determined by a certain flood-prone combination of hydrometeorological patterns before the event. ![]() 2014 Beniston & Stoffel 2016 Woldemeskel & Sharma 2016). Many other studies also confirm that floods are the result of a complex interaction between pre-event meteorological characteristics and hydrological catchment conditions ( Nied et al. (2016) exposed the primary drivers of flooding across the contiguous United States and found that for most catchments soil moisture-dependent precipitation excess, snowmelt and rain-on-snow events are much better predictors of the flooding responses. However, natural causes of fluvial floods are not limited to increased precipitation due to higher temperatures snowmelt processes and soil conditions prior to flooding are also of high significance. The historical records of catastrophic floods reveal that their increased occurrence is mostly caused by extreme precipitation events. 2012), whereas the number of flood-affected people may increase five-fold by the end of the 21st century ( Hirabayashi et al. Economic flood exposure is simulated to increase by about 200% between 20 ( Jongman et al. In general, catastrophic floods can be characterised by abruptness of water level rise and increase of intensity of flood phenomenon that are followed by enormous monetary losses and fatalities. Tweed (2011) describes the term catastrophic flooding as exceptional or rare floods with high magnitude. For obvious reasons, huge floods are attracting significant attention of the mass media, as well as scientific society. Beyond the fact that a number of catastrophic weather phenomena continue to grow and often result in awesome catastrophic floodings, they generate huge economic losses and kill people. According to numerous scientific studies, including Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC 2013), more frequent and destructive floods all over the world may happen as a consequence of climate change.
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