River Flood Susceptibility Map for 8 Global Drainage Basins

Global coverage of river flood susceptibility across 8 level 1 drainage basins. The dataset contains two raster maps per basin: one for upstream accumulating area and one for Strahler stream order of flooded rivers. It was produced by Mark Bernhofen of the University of Leeds using the methodology from Bernhofen et al. 2021.

Use Cases

• Modeling flood exposure based on upstream accumulating area data.
• Analyzing river network structure for flood susceptibility based on Strahler stream order.
• Assessing regional flood risk across major global drainage basins.
• Integrating global flood susceptibility layers into larger environmental or climate models.

Strengths

• Provides global coverage across 8 major drainage basins.
• Includes two distinct susceptibility metrics per basin: upstream area and stream order.
• Data is provided in GeoTIFF raster format at a resolution of ~90 meters at the equator.
• Methodology is documented in a peer-reviewed publication (Bernhofen et al. 2021).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• The dataset's specific temporal coverage is not stated.

Provenance

Source

University of Leeds

Collection Method

Methodology described in Bernhofen et. al. 2021 "Global Flood Exposure from Different Sized Rivers".

Geography

Global coverage across 8 level 1 drainage basins.