SUPERVISOR: Helmut HABERSACK

PROJECT ASSIGNED TO: Roman DUNST

Extreme events like large floods play an essential role for IRL since they determine central boundary conditions for the river development like sediment transport, river morphology, including width, depth and their dynamics, slope and grain size. Extreme events cause casualties, huge economic damages and are directly related to human activities and their history. Extreme events over the last 20 years demonstrated the limits of flood protection and that failures might even lead to large damages in protected areas. Floods affected around two billion people from 1997 to 2017 and floods cause an annual average loss of US$ 104 billion worldwide. However, central processes that lead to casualties and economic damages are not fully understood.

The main objective is to analyse the effects of extreme floods that occurred in the last decades in Austria and of simulated floods concerning their effects on sediment transport and morphodynamics, leading to casualties and structural damages. 

The main research questions are: 

1)What is the role of extreme floods for turbulent flow, sediment transport and morphodynamics? 

2) How are these processes affecting people and lead to human infrastructure damages during extreme events and how large should a river morphological space demand be? 

3) Conversely, how do changes in sediment regimes (due to human intervention) affect flood risk?