Abstract
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, the amount of precipitation in South Korea would increase regardless of the reduction of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. However, at the same time, it is expected that the temporal and spatial rainfall variation would also increase. Due to the impact from typhoons, 90% of the annual precipitation in Korea occurs in July, August, and September. Moreover, the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) scenario projected that the average precipitation in this period is expected to increase markedly, especially over the next 100 years. These predictions imply an increased variability of available water resources. In this study, we assessed a RBSN (rain barrel sharing network) as an efficient way to respond to the future climate change projections under the RCP scenarios when compared to the historical data. We proposed an evaluation procedure for the reliability, resilience, and vulnerability of RBSN based on a storage-reliability-yield (SRY) relationship. The result shows that the reliability and resiliency of a RBSN will improve but be more vulnerable compared to the results from the historical rainfall data. However, even in the climate change condition, the results showed that a RBSN still contributes to reduce vulnerability. The results of this study imply that a RBSN is an effective and alternative measure that can deal with the impacts of climate change in the future.
Highlights
A rainwater harvesting system (RWHS) is the accumulation and storage of rainwater for various uses directly on-site with containers, gathering tanks, and other forms of storage devices, rather than allowing water to run [1]
The results show that the storage size reduction ratio is dependent on the climate change scenarios and regions
We proposed a rain barrel sharing network (RBSN) as an effective and alternative measure that deals with the impact of climate change in the future
Summary
A rainwater harvesting system (RWHS) is the accumulation and storage of rainwater for various uses directly on-site with containers, gathering tanks, and other forms of storage devices, rather than allowing water to run [1]. The main focus of this study is to evaluate a RBSN under climate change and whether a RBSN degrades or upgrade the performance of RWHS in a qualitative basis using three performance criteria: reliability, resiliency, and vulnerability. This study assesses the performance of a RBSN under RCP scenarios, including how successfully a RBSN works (reliability), how quickly a RBSN recovers from a failure state (resiliency), and how severely a RBSN fails (vulnerability). We compared these performance criteria with different climate change scenarios and compared the results with historical rainfall data to examine the benefit of a RBSN under climate change. We assumed water demand as a random variable to contain the uncertainty of demand, similar to previous studies [23,24,26,27]
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