Hydrologic Designs for Extreme Events under Nonstationarity

Clearly, nonstationarity in future precipitation regimes is an important topic that requires increased attention. This chapter presents advances in extending stationary concepts and methods to evaluating the performance of hydraulic projects under a nonstationary paradigm. First, the chapter briefly sums up stationarity concepts. Then, it summarizes extensions to the concept of expected waiting time, which is the same as the return period, expected number of events, and risk, suggesting how to use them for hydrologic design under nonstationarity. Whether even the high-resolution climate models have the capacity to simulate potential changes in precipitation extremes at local scales is a concern. The chapter covers important situations of increasing floods and extreme sea levels, and the methods described apply to many extremes including wind, precipitation, floods, sea level rise, and other hydrologic variables.