The effects of climatic variability on spatial characteristics of Europeanriver flows

At a time when anomalous hydrological behaviour has attained a large amount of attention right across Europe, study into the links between atmospheric anomalies and hydrological variability has become very important. Over the last few years, large parts of Europe have suffered drought, sometimes las ting a number of years, whilst other regions have experienced unprecedented high flows. This paper describes a selection of results from an ongoing re search project investigating the effects of climatic variability on Europea n river flows. This investigation is carried out at the continental scale a nd focuses upon spatial characteristics of variability using regional flow anomaly series. The scale, spatial focus and use of anomaly series provide unique components to this research. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All righ ts reserved.