Projections of Potential Flood Regime Changes in California
informe científico
Fecha
2009-03Autor
Dettinger, Michael D.
Hidalgo León, Hugo G.
Das, Tapash
Cayan, Daniel R.
Knowles, Noah
Metadatos
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Floods have been a recurring theme in California’s climatology, hydrology, and politics
throughout its history. Today, California's aging water supply and flood protection
infrastructures are challenged by major floods and increased standards for urban flood
protection. With warming in the twenty-first century, some changes in California’s flood regimes
seem likely: Higher snowlines may well increase the frequency of flooding; occasional larger than
historical flood magnitudes are likely to follow—especially from the higher southern parts of the
Sierra Nevada; potentials for floods may be exacerbated by wetter winter soils in high-altitude
catchments; and opportunities for estuarine and coastal flooding may increase as sea-level rise
and flood frequencies converge. Other changes are more difficult to project, and simulation
models are used here to weigh competing influences that might either increase or diminish future
floods. Both the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) and Bay-Delta Watershed Model (BDWM)
hydrologic models responded to downscaled climate-change projections with increases in flood
frequencies and magnitudes, but neither yielded large changes in that regard, especially in the
northern parts of the state. Future characteristics of major storms, in particular pineapple
express or atmospheric river storms, by global climate models indicated changes mostly at the
extremes: Years with many atmospheric river storms become more frequent in most climate
models analyzed here, but the average number of such storms per year did not change much.
Likewise, although the average intensity of storms was not projected to increase much in most
climate models, occasional much-larger-than-historical-range storm intensities were simulated
Colecciones
- Meteorología [501]