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Hydrologic Extremes Under Climate Change: Non-stationarity and Uncertainty

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Sustainable Water Resources Planning and Management Under Climate Change

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Abstract

Hydrologic designs, hazard mitigation, and water resources management rely heavily on frequency analysis and risk assessment of extremes such as floods and droughts. Return periods and corresponding return levels of such extremes have been traditionally derived under the assumption of stationarity that has been challenged by recent studies. The presence of non-stationarity, due to various natural or anthropogenic causes, necessitates accurate modeling of the time-varying behavior of extremes, frequency analysis taking time evolution of statistical distributions into consideration, and reformulation of the definition of hydrologic risk under transient conditions. This chapter synthesizes various methodologies for investigating climate change-induced non-stationarity in hydrologic extremes using the statistical extreme value theory. Information on available computational packages to apply such methodologies is provided. Additionally, some fundamental limitations of such methodologies for deterministically modeling real-world observed time series are also discussed. Further, through an illustrative example, modeling approaches for accounting for the effects of non-stationarity in peak flows and uncertainties in the assessment of hydrologic risk under non-stationary conditions vis-à-vis traditional stationary analysis are discussed.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dan Cooley, Rick Katz, Holger Rootzen, and Francesco Serinaldi for their helpful clarifications. The R-code to calculate the expected waiting time and expected number of event- based return levels was shared by Dan Cooley.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, 400076, India

    Arpita Mondal

  2. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560012, India

    P. P. Mujumdar

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  1. Arpita Mondal
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  2. P. P. Mujumdar
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Correspondence to Arpita Mondal .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil Engineering Division of Hydraulics and Environmental Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Elpida Kolokytha

  2. The Research Center for Urban Safety and Security, Kobe University, Kobe, Hyogo, Japan

    Satoru Oishi

  3. Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatics Engineering, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, USA

    Ramesh S.V. Teegavarapu

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Mondal, A., Mujumdar, P.P. (2017). Hydrologic Extremes Under Climate Change: Non-stationarity and Uncertainty. In: Kolokytha, E., Oishi, S., Teegavarapu, R. (eds) Sustainable Water Resources Planning and Management Under Climate Change. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2051-3_2

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