Plain Language Summary
Extreme storm surges, rainfall or river discharge can cause flooding. When these events happen at the same time, even more severe flooding may follow. Climate change could affect the odds that drivers of flooding coincide, potentially leading to larger flood risk. However, few scientists have tried to compute such changes, using only a few different computer models of our climate. Here, we use a much larger set of climate models to compute how the odds that an extreme storm surge coincides with extreme precipitation could change in the future. We find that at the coastsof northwestern Europe, those odds will increase, whereas in southwestern Europe, they will mostly decrease. On average, the changes will be as large as 36% to 49% of the current odds, depending on whether the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will increase by a medium or a large amount. When we use smaller sets of climate models for our calculations, we get substantially different results in some cases. In conclusion, by using a larger set of climate models than previous studies, we have made more robust computations of how the odds that extreme storm surges and precipitation coincide will change in Europe.