Abstract
Understanding how the design hyetographs and floods will change in the future is essential for decision making in flood management plans. This study provides a methodology to quantify the expected changes in future hydraulic risks at the catchment scale in the city of Pamplona. It considers climate change projections supplied by 12 climate models, 7 return periods, 2 emission scenarios (representative concentration pathway RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5), and 3 time windows (2011–2040, 2041–2070, and 2070–2100). The Real-time Interactive Basin Simulator (RIBS) distributed hydrological model is used to simulate rainfall-runoff processes at the catchment scale. The results point to a decrease in design peak discharges for return periods smaller than 10 years and an increase for the 500- and 1000-year floods for both RCPs in the three time windows. The emission scenario RCP 8.5 usually provides the greatest increases in flood quantiles. The increase of design peak discharges is almost 10–30% higher in RCP 8.5 than in RCP 4.5. Change magnitudes for the most extreme events seem to be related to the greenhouse gas emission predictions in each RCP, as the greatest expected changes are found in 2040 for the RCP 4.5 and in 2100 for the RCP 8.5.
Highlights
In recent years, several studies have focused on the impact of climate change on the hydrological cycle
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [8] identified statistically significant increasing trends in the number of heavy precipitation events in some regions, claiming that the frequency of extreme precipitation events or the proportion of total rainfall of such events will likely increase in the 21st century over many areas of the globe due to anthropogenic influences that have contributed to the intensification of extreme precipitations at the global scale
This study aims to quantify expected flood quantile variations under climate change conditions in Pamplona (Spain) using climate change projections and a distributed rainfallrunoff model
Summary
Several studies have focused on the impact of climate change on the hydrological cycle. Recent studies to identify large-scale trends in observed time series have shown that a changing climate in the last decades both increases and decreases European river floods [15]. Expected variations in precipitation quantiles extracted from climate change projections in the Iberian Peninsula in a recent study [32] are used as input data of the Realtime Interactive Basin Simulator (RIBS) model [33,34]. Rather than using an ensemble simulation approach, a part of the work is dedicated to conducting a statistical calibration of the RIBS distributed hydrological model to reduce the model uncertainty This region has been chosen because it shows low biases associated with the climate models in reproducing the annual maxima series in the control period. This study aims to analyze the results of the 12 climate models to identify given climate models that always provide the greatest or smallest flood quantile changes in the future
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