Selecting Stochastic Climate Realizations to Efficiently Explore a Wide Range of Climate Risk to Water Resource Systems
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 142, Issue 6
Abstract
There are significant computational requirements for assessing climate change impacts on water resource system reliability and vulnerability, particularly when analyzing a wide range of plausible scenarios. These requirements often deter analysts from exhaustively identifying climate hazards. This technical note investigates two approaches for generating a subset of stochastic climate realizations that efficiently explore a range of risk to water supply systems. In both methods, a large ensemble of stochastic weather time series is generated to simulate the natural variability of the local climate system, and a selected subset of these sequences is used in the impacts assessment. Method 1 selects the subset by first passing the entire ensemble through a rainfall-runoff model and then screening the hydrologic sequences using the sequent peak algorithm. Method 2 selects a subset of climate sequences based on climate statistics alone, prior to hydrological modeling. Both methods provide insight for identifying the climate statistics that best relate to the vulnerability of the water system and can be used to reduce the computational burden of modeling climate variability and change impacts.
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Acknowledgments
This work was funded by the Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN)—a NOAA Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) project (Funding Opportunity Number: NOAA-OAR-CPO-2012-2003304). The views expressed in this technical note represent those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of NOAA. The authors thank the two reviewers and the editor for their valuable insights and suggestions, which contributed significantly to improving the paper.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 142 • Issue 6 • June 2016
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 27, 2015
Accepted: Nov 4, 2015
Published online: Jan 25, 2016
Published in print: Jun 1, 2016
Discussion open until: Jun 25, 2016
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