Resolving Emerging Issues with Aging Dams under Climate Change Projections
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 146, Issue 5
Abstract
Concerns about the collapse of dams due to overtopping are increasing owing to heavy rainfall and frequent typhoons associated with climate change. As a result, there has been a spike in anxiety among residents living near the downstream areas of dams. Although the dangers associated with dam safety are increasing, there is still a lack of comprehensive dam rehabilitation and implementation frameworks that consider climate change. A thorough review of existing dam facilities is needed in light of climate change and the deteriorating conditions of aging dams. In this study, we performed a hydrological safety assessment and developed a dam rehabilitation implementation framework to proactively diagnose and resolve dam safety issues caused by climate change and aging water infrastructure. The dam rehabilitation assessment framework has three main facets: appropriateness of evaluation components, importance of weighted analysis, and comprehensive dam rehabilitation assessment and implementation framework. The proposed approach was applied to selected sites with high feasibility of dam rehabilitation in Korea’s major river basins considering different climate change scenarios.
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Data Availability Statement
The following data, models, and code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request:
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Data: Survey data for dam rehabilitation assessment, input data to run the hydrologic modeling, and output data resulting from running different climate change scenarios.
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Models: Hydrologic models for long-term runoff simulation and Delphi-AHP weighting evaluation model used in this study.
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Code: The Excel and R scripts that process the outputs to generate the figures in the paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on the early version of the manuscript. This work is supported by the Korea Environmental Industry and Technology Institute (KEITI) grant funded by the Ministry of Environment (18AWMP-B083066-05).
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Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 146 • Issue 5 • May 2020
Copyright
©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 20, 2018
Accepted: Dec 4, 2019
Published online: Mar 10, 2020
Published in print: May 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Aug 10, 2020
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