Rainfall Patterns and Flood and Drought Risk: Assessing Vulnerabilities, Building Resilience and Enhancing Sustainability
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Water Management".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2026 | Viewed by 2364
Special Issue Editor
Interests: surface hydrology; flood; drought; modelling of hydrological processes; climate change; urban hydrology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Rainfall patterns play a crucial role in determining flood and drought risk, significantly influencing both short-term weather events and long-term climate conditions. Changes in the intensity, frequency, and distribution of rainfall can trigger floods in some regions while exacerbating droughts in others. Floods, often caused by heavy or prolonged rainfall, can devastate ecosystems, infrastructure, and livelihoods. Conversely, a precipitation deficit can increase the risk of meteorological droughts, ultimately causing problems with water resources, agriculture, and energy production.
Assessing vulnerabilities related to rainfall variability requires a multi-dimensional approach that integrates climate modeling, hydrological studies, and socio-economic analyses. Current research gaps involve the accurate prediction of rainfall events, the estimation of heavy rainfall parameters (e.g., time of concentration and statistical distributions), and addressing uncertainties in measurements and calculations, as well as the lack of adequate data. Understanding the interaction between natural and anthropogenic factors and improving long-term climate forecasts are also significant challenges. Many regions still lack sufficient data and tools for effective flood and drought risk management.
Building resilience to flood and drought phenomena requires improving early warning systems, adopting sustainable water management practices, and implementing adaptive infrastructure solutions. Rainfall data also have a decisive impact on the results of hydrodynamic modeling for urban drainage systems and flood risk assessments.
Expanding knowledge and addressing challenges in rainfall calculations are essential to preventing floods and droughts. Therefore, the primary objective of this Special Issue is to contribute to discussions on the need to better understand rainfall processes and apply modern techniques to calculate design rainfall, as well as indicators of drought, including the formation stages of these phenomena. This includes introducing new ideas and solutions in drought and flood risk management. We encourage authors to share their insights, knowledge, and achievements in rainfall analysis, with a focus on its influence on flood and drought processes. This may include new methods for measuring meteorological factors, such as using satellite imagery or reanalyzed data to assess precipitation, soil moisture, and more, as well as forecasting floods and droughts.
Particular topics of interest include:
- Current and future precipitation models;
- Temporal and spatial rainfall distribution;
- Impact of climate change on rainfall characteristics;
- Statistical analysis of precipitation data;
- Rainfall scenarios for modelling of floods and droughts;
- Modern techniques of measures of precipitations;
- Useful new data of precipitation in floods and drought analyses
- Flood and drought risk management in the aspect of climate change;
- Past and future climate change impacts on precipitation extremes.
Dr. Andrzej Walega
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- rainfall models
- IDF/DDF curves
- precipitation data
- design storms
- drought indicators
- flood and drought vulnerability
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