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FLOPROS flood-protection standards — introduction#

FLOPROS (FLOod PROtection Standards) is a global database of the flood-protection standards in force across the world, expressed as return periods in years — e.g. "this region is defended against the 100-year flood". earthlens ships a single flopros backend that reads the FLOPROS shapefile directly from the NHESS-2016 paper's public supplement (nhess.copernicus.org, CC-BY-3.0, no credentials) and returns the ~4650 subnational polygons carrying the protection standards.

This page orients the backend. For the hands-on download walkthrough see Usage; the rendered API is the Reference page.

Why it matters here#

FLOPROS is the defended-vs-undefended correction. A raw flood-hazard map (a depth or extent layer, e.g. from aqueduct or gee) tells you where water could go; it does not know about dikes, levees, and flood-control policy. Clip or threshold that hazard map by the local FLOPROS standard and you separate the areas that are actually protected to a given return period from those that are exposed. That is the step between a hazard map and a defended-risk estimate.

Like the GDACS, Aqueduct, and admin-boundaries backends, FLOPROS departs from the gridded backends (CHC rainfall, ERA5, GEE imagery) in two ways:

  • The output is a vector table, not a grid. A query returns the subnational polygons carrying protection-standard columns, so the facade rejects an aggregate= argument.
  • There is no time axis. FLOPROS is a static snapshot, so start / end are accepted but ignored.

The FLOPROS layers#

Each polygon carries the protection standard under several layers, exposed under friendly names (the source .dbf column is in brackets):

  • modelled_riverine (ModL_Riv) — the modelled riverine standard.
  • merged_riverine (MerL_Riv) — the Merged layer: the recommended combined riverine standard (empirical where known, modelled elsewhere).
  • design_min_riverine / design_max_riverine (DL_Min_Riv / DL_Max_Riv) — the Design-layer range (design standards of actual defences).
  • policy_min_riverine / policy_max_riverine (PL_Min_Riv / PL_Max_Riv) — the Policy-layer range (protection targets set by policy).
  • The four *_coastal layers (DL_*_Co / PL_*_Co) — the coastal equivalents of the Design and Policy layers.

A value of 0 means no standard is recorded for that layer in that unit. For a single representative number, use merged_riverine.

Licence#

FLOPROS is CC-BY-3.0. Cite Scussolini et al. (2016), Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 16, 1049–1061 (doi:10.5194/nhess-16-1049-2016). The backend logs the attribution on every download.