Spatiotemporal Impacts of Climate and Demand on Water Supply in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Basin
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 144, Issue 2
Abstract
The transboundary Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) Basin in the southeastern United States has a long history of competition for water resources and litigation surrounding these conflicts. This case study applies the decision-scaling approach to explore the spatiotemporal impacts to water supply deficits in the ACF Basin from natural climate variability, from change in mean precipitation and temperature, and from shifts in municipal and industrial (M&I) water demand. System performance is characterized by reliability, vulnerability, and effective life (i.e., years until crossing an unacceptable performance threshold). The results indicate that long-term water supply reliability and vulnerability are sensitive to, in decreasing order of importance, changes in mean precipitation, mean M&I demand, and mean temperature. In the short term, natural climate variability causes the most uncertainty in vulnerability. Reliability (and the corresponding effective life) is uniform across the basin because of a shared water supply curtailments management system, whereas vulnerability (and the corresponding effective life) varies greatly. In particular, metropolitan Atlanta exhibits high sensitivity and vulnerability to stressors because of its location in the headwaters and high demand levels.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the reviewers for their comments and suggestions that improved the paper. The authors gratefully acknowledge the use of the ACF systems model with permission from Richard Palmer. They are also grateful for the funding support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Awards 0907995 and 1451512 and from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) issued through the Department of Defense (DoD) under Project RC-2204. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF or the SERDP/DoD.
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Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 144 • Issue 2 • February 2018
Copyright
©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Feb 27, 2017
Accepted: Jul 12, 2017
Published online: Nov 22, 2017
Published in print: Feb 1, 2018
Discussion open until: Apr 22, 2018
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