Highlight articles 

The NHESS paper “A climate-conditioned catastrophe risk model for UK flooding” by Bates and colleagues presents and validates a new flood model for the UK that simulates pluvial, fluvial and coastal flood risks at a resolution of 20 to 25 metres. The authors then use their scheme to estimate the probability-loss distribution for UK flooding under various future climate and policy scenarios. Their paper provides the most detailed and realistic analysis to date of current and future flood risk in the UK. The key findings of their work are: (1) Previous UK flood losses based on government data and used in national climate change risk assessments are overestimated by a factor of about 3. (2) Official UK estimates lie well outside the paper's modelled loss distribution, which is plausibly centred on the observations. (3) The UK 1% annual probability flood losses were only about 6% greater in the average climate conditions of 2020 than for the period of historical river flow and rainfall observations (centred approximately on 1995). (4) Increases in risk can be kept to around ~8% if all COP26 2030 carbon emission reduction pledges and ‘net zero’ commitments are implemented in full. (5) Implementing only the COP26 pledges increases UK 1% annual probability flood losses by ~23% above recent historical values, and potentially ~37% if climate sensitivity turns out to be higher than currently thought.

This paper examines the warning deficits in conjunction with the major flooding event in Germany of summer 2021. The event caused many fatalities and enormous damage. The warning procedures proved to be insufficient, and after investigations it was decided to install a cell broadcast system in Germany, which is already in place today. The deeper investigations on the warning perceptions and the influencing factors is of major interest to readers beyond the scientific community.

I agree with the statement proposed

The topic treated in this work is potentially interesting for our community, giving the threats presented for Sub-Saharan Africa; it is also a review, so it has the capability to attract a lot of attention from the public.

I also agree with tha handling editor.

The paper addresses historical flood marks as a information source, coming to the conclusion that it is worthwhile to maintain them, and include them in scientific evaluations. The authors find, for example, plausible and historically sound reasons in changed local hydraulic conditions by flood protection walls, and effects of exceptional processes during a massive ice jam.

This paper is very relevant for science but also society: the paper presents an approach for estimating rare to very rare floods at multiple sites in a large river basin. Compared to statistical approaches based on streamflow observations, the Continuous Simulation (CS) approach has substantial advantages in that it explicitly considers important processes of flood generation such as soil moisture, snow accumulation and snowmelt, and in addition can implement lake regulation, dam operation as well as lake and floodplain retention

The paper can be considered as highlight paper

I agree with the assessment of the handling editor: hot topic, excellent analysis, holistic perspective, clear relation to impacts and stakeholders. Therefore, I agree it qualifies as a potential highlight paper for NHESS. Best regards, Joaquim Pinto

The paper could have a strong impact in the entire Alpine region, where avalanche forecasting is a critical issue to manage