Abstract
National and international security communities (e.g., U.S. Department of Defense) have shown increasing attention for innovating critical infrastructure and installations due to recurring high-profile flooding events in recent years. The standard infrastructure design approach relies on local precipitation-based intensity-duration-frequency (PREC-IDF) curves that do not account for snow process and assume stationary climate, leading to high failure risk and increased maintenance costs. This paper reviews the recently developed next-generation IDF (NG-IDF) curves that explicitly account for the mechanisms of extreme water available for runoff including rainfall, snowmelt, and rain-on-snow under nonstationary climate. The NG-IDF curve is an enhancement to the PREC-IDF curve and provides a consistent design approach across rain- to snow-dominated regions, which can benefit engineers and planners responsible for designing climate-resilient facilities, federal emergency agencies responsible for the flood insurance program, and local jurisdictions responsible for developing design manuals and approving subsequent infrastructure designs. Further, we discuss the recent advances in climate and hydrologic science communities that have not been translated into actional information in the engineering community. To bridge the gap, we advocate that building climate-resilient infrastructure goes beyond the traditional local design scale where engineers rely on recipe-based methods only; the future hydrologic design is a multi-scale problem and requires closer collaboration between climate scientists, hydrologists, and civil engineers.
Highlights
Recurring high-profile flooding events (e.g., 2017 California) has led to major public safety concerns and motivated national security communities to explore new methods to innovate critical infrastructure (ESTCP, 2018)
Infrastructure design to withstand extreme flooding relies largely on precipitation-based intensity-duration-frequency (PREC-IDF) curves developed at the local scale, which is coupled with single-event
If NGIDF curves are used while ignoring climate nonstationarity, the resulting projections showed that the two Department of Defense (DoD) installations are at risk for underdesign by up to 80% through the end of the century
Summary
Recurring high-profile flooding events (e.g., 2017 California) has led to major public safety concerns and motivated national security communities to explore new methods to innovate critical infrastructure (ESTCP, 2018). Most of the sites found to be underdesigned were in the PNW and continental regime that feature deeper snowpack and longer snow accumulation seasons At these sites, the authors (Yan et al, 2019a) further compared the peak design flood estimates using NG-IDF and PREC-IDF curves coupled with the TR-55 rainfall-runoff model. To validate the NG-IDF approach in design flood estimates, the authors (Yan et al, 2020) developed an experimental hillslope appropriate for mountainous topography to allow direct comparison between the DHSVM continuous simulation and NG-IDF approach They applied the same experimental hillslope at these 246 SNOTEL sites to examine and compare the performances of the NG-IDF approach across the WUS under various hydroclimate conditions. Downscaled ensemble simulation is desired and undergoing in our study
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