As our climate system climbs through its current warming path, temperature and precipitation aregreatly affected also in their extremes. Owing to their increasing societal impact, climate extremeshave recently attracted large international programmes (IPCC, WCRP grand challenges) with aneffort to standardize their detection (e.g. through climate extremes indices) and to allow attributionto climate change. There is a general concern that climate change may affect also the magnitudeand frequency of river fl oods and, as a consequence, that existing and planned hydraulicstructures and fl ood defences may become inadequate to provide the required protection level inthe future. While a wide body of literature on the detection of fl ood changes is available, theidentifi cation of their underlying causes (i.e. fl ood change attribution) is still debated. In particular,in alpine areas, changes in heavy precipitation is only one of the drivers of fl ood change, beingsnow-rain partitioning and snowmelt other key processes in the formation of river fl oods of differenttype.