hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
Future changes in regional climate due to global warming can result in changes of extreme floods. While change assessments of climatic variables, such as temperature and precipitation abound, regional estimations of projected flood impact variables, such as river discharges, inundation extent and depths and flood losses, are rare. We apply the Regional Flood Model (RFM) to assess the projected changes of flood risk for Germany. RFM consists of a model chain covering all major flood impact processes – from a triggering meteorological event to inundation and damage. To this end, a multi-variate stochastic weather generator conditioned on circulation patterns and regional temperature deduced from global climate models is developed to generate long spatially consistent synthetic series of precipitation. The non-stationary weather generator thus considers dynamic and thermo-dynamic change signals simulated by the global climate models. Projected future changes in flood impact variables are estimated for an ensemble of the climate models, two shared socioeconomic pathways and two future periods up to 2100. Changes in climate are then propagated through a process-based hydrological, a coupled 1D-2D hydrodynamic and flood damage model of RFM to estimate flood impact and risk shifts. The analysis reveals specific circulation patterns responsible for flood changes in winter and summer seasons.
