Author(s): Van-Thanh-Van Nguyen
Linked Author(s): Van-Thanh-Van Nguyen
Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: Most countries in the world have significant investments in urban water infrastructures (e. g., storm drainage and flood management systems). Every day, people rely on these systems to protect lives, property, and natural water environment. These infrastructures have reduced the vulnerability of the cities, but at the same time could make them more vulnerable to climate extremes, due to the lack of consideration of what might occur when the design criteria are exceeded. Furthermore, recent assessment reports on climate change have indicated a worldwide increase in the frequency of extreme weather events because of global warming. Consequently, research on developing innovative approaches for limiting and adapting climate change impacts on urban water infrastructures is highly critical due to the substantial investments involved. However, it has been widely recognized that the main difficulty in dealing with climate change impacts for urban water infrastructure design is “how to estimate accurately the changes in the extreme rainfall processes at the urban basin scale projected by global/regional climate models because these models do not contain an adequate description of the governing physical processes at relevant high temporal and spatial resolutions as required by the impact and adaptation studies”. This necessitates some form of downscaling of the climate model simulations from a coarse spatial resolution (20 – 250 km) down to much finer spatial grids, and even point values if changes in local extreme rainfall processes are to be assessed. In addition, the required time scales for assessing the climate change impacts on the urban hydrologic processes are usually less than one day. Therefore, the overall objective of this paper is to provide an overview of some recent advances and shortcomings in the downscaling of extreme rainfall processes in the climate change context from both theoretical and practical viewpoints. Another focus of this work is on the development of a technical guide to provide some guidance to water professionals in Canada on how to consider the climate change information in the design of urban water infrastructures (CSA, 2019).
Year: 2024