Climate change research has shown that increases in extreme rainfall are anticipated to continue throughout the 21st century, which may cause more severe and frequent flooding in the future. This presents stormwater engineers and planners with a key challenge: how to incorporate these recent and projected future changes in rainfall into infrastructure design and management.
To support entities in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and Virginia in mitigating these challenges, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (MARISA) team completed a project in which they developed a set of updated intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves that reflect projected future climate changes. the first speaker will briefly describe the project’s motivation, data, methodology, and results and a brief demo of the online tool.
The second presentation will discuss tools that can help to project future precipitation changes that will affect design storms, discuss the evidence that short-duration low frequency storms are increasing in intensity at much greater rates than average precipitation, and provide guidance on how best to estimate the changes.
Our third speaker will cover climate change impacts in the Pacific Northwest where studies project decreases in snowpack, increases in stream temperatures, and widespread changes in streamflow timing, flooding, and summer minimum flows. Most Pacific Northwest, for example, watersheds will be rain-dominant by the end of the 21st century and this talk will summarize existing science as well as recent work to apply this science in specific management contexts.
The last presentation will cover how RAND partnered with SEDAPAL, the primary water utility serving Lima, Peru, to evaluate how SEDAPAL’s master plan for water management performs against changes to future droughts induced by climate change. In this talk, I will discuss how we characterized drought under climate change and used this information to evaluate the performance of their system and inform infrastructure and management decisions.
Presenters:
- Krista Romita Grocholski, PH.D. RAND
- Mark Maimone, PhD, PE, DWRE, BCEE CDM Smith
- Guillaume Mauger, PH.D. University of Washington
- James Syme, RAND
PDH Credits will be available for attendees following this event on this platform. Please look for further information to come.
