CSDMS 2016 annual meeting poster AlbertKettner
The impact of climate change on riverine flooding
Sagy Cohen, University of Alabama Tuscaloosa Alabama, United States. sagy.cohen@ua.edu
Irina Overeem, University of Colorado Boulder Colorado, United States. irina.overeem@colorado.edu
Balazs Fekete, The City University of New York New York New York, United States. bfekete@ccny.cuny.edu
Robert Brakenridge, University of Colorado Boulder Colorado, United States. Robert.Brakenridge@colorado.edu
James Syvitski, University of Colorado Boulder Colorado, United States. james.syvitski@colorado.edu
Abstract:
Flooding is the most common natural hazard worldwide, affecting 21 million people every year. River induced flooding typically occurs when streamflow exceeds bankfull stage at a certain stretch along a river at a given point in time. While some, mostly large-scale, flooding events are relatively perennial most are highly transient. This makes flooding difficult to predict. Although hydrological models can quite accurately estimate streamflow conditions, overbanking is dependent upon localized river morphology and hydraulics, both difficult to ascertain. Recent advances in characterization and modeling of river-floodplain interactions now allows us to provide a spatially and temporally explicit first order estimates of the location, magnitude, frequency, and duration of floods of global rivers. Here we apply the global Water Balance Model (WBM) to quantify a) location, frequency and magnitude of flooding and b) the impact of future predicted climate change on this quantification. Among others, WBM simulates daily riverine streamflow at 6 arcminutes spatial resolution. The bankfull water discharge is estimated for each river location by determining the 2year flood frequency return interval based on the Log-Pearson Type III Distribution. Similarly, globally discharges that mimic the 10, 25, 50 and 100 year flood event were established. Flood magnitude and frequencies of the last 30 years (1975-2004) are determined and compared to future simulated floods (2070-2099).
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