Impacts of climate change on rainfall extremes and urban drainage systems
Date
2012
Authors
Willems, P.
Olsson, J.
Arnbjerg Nielsen, K.
Beecham, S.
Pathirana, A.
Gregersen, I.B.
Madsen, H.
Nguyen, V.T.V.
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Book
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Abstract
Cities are becoming increasingly vulnerable to flooding because of rapid urbanization, installation of complex infrastructure, and changes in the precipitation patterns caused by anthropogenic climate change. While there are many previous works that have dealt with the effects of urbanization, the number of quantitative assessment studies related to the impacts of climate change on urban drainage remains, however, rather limited. This is partly due to the particular difficulties of dealing with this type of climate impact assessment for urban catchments. In particular, downscaling of outputs from global circulation models or regional climate models to urban catchment scales are needed because these models do not contain an adequate description of the rainfall governing processes at relevant high temporal and spatial resolutions. More specifically, for urban catchments these resolutions could be as small as a few kilometres spatially and as small as a few minutes temporally. Consequently, the expected results from such impact studies can be highly uncertain and dependent on the feasibility and reliability of the downscaling process. This problem becomes more challenging when dealing with the extreme runoff events since the properties of such extreme events do not necessarily reflect those of the average precipitation.
This book provides a state-of-the-art review of existing methodologies and results that are relevant to the assessment of climate change impacts on urban rainfall extremes as well as on urban hydrology and hydraulics. In particular, this overview focuses on the limitations and pitfalls of current methods, which are important for every user of results from urban impact studies. Further, the various issues and challenges facing the research community in dealing with the assessment and adaptation of climate change impacts for urban drainage infrastructure design and management are discussed.
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Link to a related website: http://oapen.org/download?type=document&docid=1004277, Open Access via Unpaywall
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Copyright 2012 IWA Publishing