Approaches for Hydrologic Designs and Adaptation for Extreme Events under Nonstationarity

Keywords

Nonstationarity, Hydrologic Design, Extremes, Adaptation

Start Date

27-6-2018 10:40 AM

End Date

27-6-2018 12:00 PM

Abstract

Infrastructure built for protecting communities from the impacts of extreme events have largely been designed based on concepts such as return period and risk assuming stationarity. In view of the increased attention to the effects of anthropogenic and climate variability and change, traditional methods of hydrologic designs are being extended to deal with nonstationarity. This has attracted attention of national and international agencies, research institutions, academia, and practicing water specialists, which led to developing new techniques that may be useful in those cases where there is good evidence and attribution of nonstationarity. We review the various techniques proposed in the field and point out some of the challenges ahead in future developments and applications. These methods are applied and compared using two examples of increasing floods and extreme sea levels. In addition, the effect of uncertainty introduced by the projection of nonstationarity into the future along with potential options for dealing with it are discussed. The importance of developing adaptive pathways based on flexible designs is also emphasized.

Stream and Session

Stream C: Integrated Social, Economic, Ecological, and Infrastructural Modeling

C11: Integrated Methods and Tools for Flood Risk and Water Supply Management

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 
Jun 27th, 10:40 AM Jun 27th, 12:00 PM

Approaches for Hydrologic Designs and Adaptation for Extreme Events under Nonstationarity

Infrastructure built for protecting communities from the impacts of extreme events have largely been designed based on concepts such as return period and risk assuming stationarity. In view of the increased attention to the effects of anthropogenic and climate variability and change, traditional methods of hydrologic designs are being extended to deal with nonstationarity. This has attracted attention of national and international agencies, research institutions, academia, and practicing water specialists, which led to developing new techniques that may be useful in those cases where there is good evidence and attribution of nonstationarity. We review the various techniques proposed in the field and point out some of the challenges ahead in future developments and applications. These methods are applied and compared using two examples of increasing floods and extreme sea levels. In addition, the effect of uncertainty introduced by the projection of nonstationarity into the future along with potential options for dealing with it are discussed. The importance of developing adaptive pathways based on flexible designs is also emphasized.