Floods of Central Europe during the Late Quaternary

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The PALEO FLOOD project will reconstruct the date, magnitude, and boundary conditions of the most severe flood events in central Europe through analysis of Eifel lake sediments. PALEO FLOOD will study the weather extremes of the Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 1-4, and calculate the frequency of extreme events per century/millennium to understand the characteristics and structure of precipitation patterns. Statistical analysis will be applied to address the forcing of weather events, i.e. assess whether climate extremes are a stochastic component of internal variations or associated with specific boundary conditions and external forcing including volcanic and solar activity and/or North Atlantic SST changes. We will concentrate on the last 60.000 years in central Europe. This information will serve as a base line to understand if the late Holocene weather extremes are unique or within the normal range of weather variability. To achieve this we will analysis all flood event layers in the sediments of 25 14C dated sediment cores from Eifel maar lakes which cover the entire last 60.000 years. Data generation will be done by microscopic microfacies analysis, µXRF geochemistry and CamSizer grain size analysis. The event layers will be studied from each maar to determine lateral and vertical sorting gradients that characterize turbidites and slumps and distinguish them from flood suspension layers. The scientific goal of the project is a time series of flood events and precipitation anomalies in the Eifel. Modern meteorological and river gauge data show with statistical significance that the local Eifel hydrological extreme events correlate with precipitation extreme events in the entire region of central Germany.