Data analysis reveals that extreme events have increased the flood inundations in the Taquari River Valley, southern Brazil

Abstract

Flood inundations represented 43.5% of the world’s deaths caused by natural disasters in 2019 and have caused uncountable damages in cities and human settlements in the last years, especially in Brazil. The dataset comprises the records of the Encantado´s pluviometric station, a municipality located beside the margin of the Taquari River in southern Brazil, which comprises the rainfall time series (n = 36,466) over 78 years, from April 1943 to December 2020. Complementary datasets also include the annual volume of precipitation per year and the level reached by the Taquari River during 44 flood inundations since 1941. The number of events is subsampled because only 32 years have the complete record of the river level. Three of the five major flood inundations at Encantado occurred after 2001, and the more severe flood recorded the maximum level of the Taquari River (20,27 meters) on July 8^th, 2020. Thirty-four percent of all flood inundations in the city were recorded between 2011 and 2020. The months of July to October record 70% of all the events, but there is no record of floods in February and December throughout the data series. The human occupation of the floodplain has been fast in the last decades, and most of the urban area has a potential risk of being affected by flood inundations. Moreover, extreme rainfall events and flood events have been more frequent in the last 30 years. Therefore, this database can contribute as a starting point for developing predictive models and verifying a possible correlation of floods with extreme events and global climatic changes.