Climate Change Impacts on Runoff Generation for the Design of Sustainable Stormwater Infrastructure

摘要

Climate change over the Pacific Northwest is expected to alter the hydrological cycle, such as an increase in winter flooding potential due to more precipitation falling as snow and more frequent rain on snow events. Existing infrastructure for stormwater management may be inadequate to handle the expected increase in winter flood events. Therefore, there is a need to make recommendations for the design of alternate stormwater infrastructure, such as Low Impact Development (LID), in Region X to handle stormwater in the long term. This is an important problem because stormwater issues will intensify as new roads are built and climate change increases flooding potential, and because there is a push for transportation infrastructure in Region X to become aoegreena and LID is a deep green alternative. The long-term goal in conjunction with other projects is to identify the hydrological impacts of projected climate change for Region X and to use this information to evaluate existing Region X infrastructure and practices and to make recommendations for the design of new infrastructure to sustainably handle stormwater. The objective of this specific application is to compare the hydrological conditions for historical climate to those of a future climate over the Palouse River basin as information necessary to design sustainable transportation infrastructure. The central hypothesis is that a 2- year storm for the future climate will produce a larger amount of highway runoff than the 2-year storm for the historical climate. The objective will be achieved through the offline coupling of a hydrology model with global climate models (GCMs). Climate change scenarios will be obtained from multiple GCMs and multiple emissions scenarios to produce a range of uncertainty in future simulated runoff. The expected outcome from this project is the development of a method (that can be applied elsewhere) to generate the hydrology data needed to design sustainable infrastructure.