Synthetic Drought Scenario Generation to Support Bottom-Up Water Supply Vulnerability Assessments
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 142, Issue 11
Abstract
Exploratory simulation allows analysts to discover scenarios in which existing or planned water supplies may fail to meet stakeholder objectives. These robustness assessments rely heavily on the choice of plausible future scenarios, which, in the case of drought management, requires sampling or generating a streamflow ensemble that extends beyond the historical record. This study develops a method to modify synthetic streamflow generators by increasing the frequency and severity of droughts for the purpose of exploratory modeling. To support management decisions, these synthetic droughts can be related to recent observed droughts of consequence for regional stakeholders. The method approximately preserves the spatial and temporal correlation of historical streamflow in drought-adjusted scenarios. The approach is demonstrated in a bottom-up planning context using an urban water portfolio design problem in North Carolina, a region whose water supply faces both climate and population pressures. Synthetic scenarios are used to simulate the implications for reliability and cost if events with similar severity to the recent 2007–2008 drought become more frequent under climate change, and in general, the system-level consequences of increasingly frequent and/or severe droughts. Finally, synthetically generated drought extremes are compared with runoff projections derived from downscaled climate model output, serving to support bottom-up robustness methods in water systems planning.
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Acknowledgments
Funding for this work was provided by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture (WSC Agreement No. 2014-67003-22076). The views expressed in this work represent those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the NSF or the USDA. The authors further acknowledge the World Climate Research Program’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling and the climate modeling groups listed in Table 1, for producing and making available their model output. The authors wish to thank Jery Stedinger and Calvin Whealton for helpful discussions related to the paper.
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Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 142 • Issue 11 • November 2016
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© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Nov 2, 2015
Accepted: May 20, 2016
Published online: Jul 13, 2016
Published in print: Nov 1, 2016
Discussion open until: Dec 13, 2016
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