Integrated framework for assessing climate change impact on extreme rainfall and the urban drainage system

Abstract

Abstract Urban areas are becoming increasingly vulnerable to extreme storms and flash floods, which could be more damaging under climate change. This study presented an integrated framework for assessing climate change impact on extreme rainfall and urban drainage systems by incorporating a number of statistical and modelling techniques. Starting from synthetic future climate data generated by the stochastic weather generator, the simple scaling method and the Huff rainfall design were adopted for rainfall disaggregation and rainfall design. After having obtained 3-min level designed rainfall information, the urban hydrological model (i.e., Storm Water Management Model) was used to carry out the runoff analysis. A case study in a tropical city was used to demonstrate the proposed framework. Particularly, the impact of selecting different general circulation models and Huff distributions on future 1-h extreme rainfall and the performance of the urban drainage system were investigated. It was revealed that the proposed framework is flexible and easy to implement in generating temporally high-resolution rainfall data under climate model projections and offers a parsimonious way of assessing urban flood risks considering the uncertainty arising from climate change model projections, downscaling and rainfall design.