California Hydrologic Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptive Planning Project
I collaborated in this project, to quantify and visualize the hydrologic vulnerability of the reservoirs in California to changing climatic conditions.
This study was presented in AGU Fall 2020 meeting. The abstract of the presentation is quoted here:
“Understanding the effect of climate variability in terms of reservoir management can be challenging as they rely on stringent operation policies based on the stationary assumption from the likelihood of historical stream-flow extremes. With changing climate, the characteristics of the stream-flow extremes are changing and so are the hydro-logic antecedent conditions (e.g., snow water equivalent, soil moisture, evaporation) which are responsible for altering the response of the water systems in general. Furthermore, with the increase in temperature, the hydrologic cycle is expected to be more intense causing more extreme precipitation events. More intensified glacier melting is projected due to warming and changes in the timing/rate of melting snow might be responsible to alter the seasonality of stream-flow (e.g., spring discharge is predicted to increase and summer discharge is expected to decrease). Therefore, proper attention is needed to understand the dynamics of temperature trends, precipitation characteristics, snow-pack accumulation, and other hydrologic variables under climate change scenarios for long-term reservoir management. This study aims to investigate the reservoir response for the altering characteristics of hydro-logic antecedent variables of water systems under changing climate scenarios. The results will demonstrate the confidence gained in reservoir risk characterization for long-term simulation, as well as improvements in understanding the potential changes of antecedent hydrologic condition variables under climate uncertainty.”
This work is accepted and is in the publication process at the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management.
References:
- Rahat, S., Steinschneider, S., Kucharski, J. R., Arnold, W., Olszewski, J., Walker, W., ... & Ray, P. (2020, December). Investigating the Reservoir Response for the Antecedent Conditions related to Extreme Flood Events under Climate Non-Stationarity. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts (Vol. 2020, pp. H193-0011).
- Rahat, S., Steinschneider S., Kucharski, J., Arnold, W., Olzewski, J., Walker, W., Maendly, R., Wasti, A., & Ray, P. A. (2022). Characterizing Hydrologic Vulnerability under Non-Stationary Climate and Antecedent Conditions using a Process-Informed Stochastic Weather Generator. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management (In Publication)