Abstract
Exploring potential floods is both essential and critical to making informed decisions for adaptation options at a river basin scale. The present study investigates changes in flood extremes in the future using downscaled CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project—Phase 5) high-resolution ensemble projections of near-term climate for the Upper Thu Bon catchment in Vietnam. Model bias correction techniques are utilized to improve the daily rainfall simulated by the multi-model climate experiments. The corrected rainfall is then used to drive a calibrated supper-tank model for runoff simulations. The flood extremes are analyzed based on the Gumbel extreme value distribution and simulation of design hydrograph methods. Results show that the former method indicates almost no changes in the flood extremes in the future compared to the baseline climate. However, the later method explores increases (approximately 20%) in the peaks of very extreme events in the future climate, especially, the flood peak of a 50-year return period tends to exceed the flood peak of a 100-year return period of the baseline climate. Meanwhile, the peaks of shorter return period floods (e.g., 10-year) are projected with a very slight change. Model physical parameterization schemes and spatial resolution seem to cause larger uncertainties; while different model runs show less sensitivity to the future projections.
Highlights
Floods are among the most extreme natural disasters that threaten millions of lives and often induce severe damages to infrastructure and ecosystems
Before addressing the investigation of flood extremes in the future, it is notable that the CMIP5 near-term experiments are on decadal timescales so that the selected 30-year time-slice representing the baseline climate is divided into three decadal time-slices: 1979–1988, 1989–1998, and 1999–2008
The rainfall and flood extremes will be analyzed for individual decadal time-slices averaged to represent the baseline climate (1979–2008)
Summary
Floods are among the most extreme natural disasters that threaten millions of lives and often induce severe damages to infrastructure and ecosystems. Thousands of casualties and economic losses of tens of billions of US dollars are caused by the floods around the world [1]. In the past few decades, a large number of major floods have occurred across the continents [2]. Increasing trend of the major floods seems to be exacerbated under a changing climate as a result of global warming when most projections show significant increases in frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall events (e.g., [1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]).
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