Special issue  

The recent flood in early June 2013 resulted in numerous casualties, mass evacuations, immense material damage and further socio-economic problems in Central Europe. This event occurred in a period of numerous other recent floods, drawing attention to the even greater, catastrophic historical floods in Europe that occurred in earlier centuries. A deeper knowledge and a better understanding of these events can provide us with extremely useful information for developing more effective flood risk management approaches. This is especially true in areas with a large density of human population. Therefore, it is of crucial importance to understand the causes of extreme flood events, the changes in their frequency in the past several hundreds of years, and to what extent the magnitudes and processes of the greatest flood events in historic times are comparable with those of present-day extremes.