CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Paraná River floods have important negative societal and economic impacts onsoutheastern South America. Although long (>250 years) records of Paraná floodswould certainly contribute to understand and predict these natural disasters, suchrecords do not yet exist. On the one hand, instrumental Paraná water level data havebeen available only for post-1900 years. On the other hand, a documentaryreconstruction of Paraná floods was obtained but only for 1590-1805 (Prieto, 2007).Hence, there is a lack of flood data for most of the 19th century. Currently, we are fillingthis data gap in order to obtain the first continuous 430-year-long record of Paranáfloods. More precisely, we are gathering the missing 19th century flood data by i)rescuing historical instrumental water level data, ii) analyzing documentary evidence,and (iii) using flood marks. We recently rescued water level data that go back to 1875(Antico et al., 2017, 2018, 2019). Preliminary results show that the magnitudes of somepre-1900 floods were comparable or even higher than those of modern floods. Sincethe Paraná River is one of the ten largest rivers in the world, we expect to contribute toa better understanding of the global-scale variability of floods.