Abstract
Riverine floods that occur simultaneously over multiple regions often lead to amplified societal and environmental impacts compared to individual events. However, the pattern and mechanisms governing the global interconnection of peak river discharge across spatially distant and proximate locations remain largely unexplored. Here, on the basis of a global annual peak discharge database from 4,407 observational hydrometric stations, we identify hubs for remotely linked discharge peaks spanning thousands of kilometres. We show increasing trends in the number of remotely linked watersheds and the total drainage area, pointing to amplified synchronization of global peak river discharge since the 1980s. Ocean–atmosphere oscillations, through the perturbation of both temperature and precipitation anomalies, dictate the global coupling pattern and temporal evolution of discharge peaks. Our findings highlight an emergent profile of global peak river flow in a warming climate that can benefit coordinated flood risk management.
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Data availability
The annual peak discharge dataset is available at https://www.bafg.de/GRDC/. The meteorological variables are available at https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-single-levels?tab=eqc and https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-pressure-levels?tab=overview. The monthly climate indices are available at https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/climateindices/list/. The Land-Use Harmonization data are available at https://luh.umd.edu/. Version 1.3 of the Global Reservoir and Dam product is available at https://www.globaldamwatch.org/grand/.
Code availability
The source code for this study is available via Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.26139493.v4 (ref. 50). The code is implemented in Python (version 3.8.8). Base maps are generated using the GeoPandas Python module with Natural Earth data (https://www.naturalearthdata.com/).
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Acknowledgements
Y.Y., L.Y. and Q.W. are supported by the National Science Foundation of China (grant number 52379012), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant number 0209-14380133), the ‘GeoX’ Interdisciplinary Project of the Frontiers Science Center for Critical Earth Material Cycling (grant number 20250204) and the Basic Research Program of Jiangsu Province (grant number BK20231541). The flood network in this paper is calculated on the computing facilities in the High-Performance Computing Center of Nanjing University.
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Conceptualization: Y.Y. and L.Y. Methodology: Y.Y., L.Y. and G.V. Investigation: Y.Y., L.Y., G.V. and F.Z. Visualization: Y.Y. and L.Y. Funding acquisition: L.Y. Project administration: L.Y. Supervision: L.Y. Writing (original draft): Y.Y. and L.Y. Writing (review and editing): all authors.
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Nature Climate Change thanks Somnath Mondal, Nasser Najibi and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Yang, Y., Yang, L., Villarini, G. et al. Synchronization of global peak river discharge since the 1980s. Nat. Clim. Chang. 15, 1084–1090 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02427-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02427-6
