Assessment of Mississippi River & Tributaries Future Flood Conditions
Abstract
A vast majority of research and studies have demonstrated that changing climate and non-stationary conditions are inevitable. The magnitude and frequency of extreme events are of critical importance in the evaluation of river systems for confidence in their capacity of flood protection under current and future conditions. This study investigates the flood recurrence values and peak flows across the entire Mississippi River Basin in response to long term climate projections and future flood conditions. An ensemble of varying climate simulations was executed using the Routing Application Parallel Discharge (RAPID) river routing model. The runoff data were obtained from the VIC land surface model using the Bias-Correction Spatial Disaggregation (BCSD) to downscale (and bias-correct) raw Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) precipitation and temperature. The river network with more than 1.2 million river reaches was built for the entire Mississippi River Basin based on the NHDPlus version 2. Streamflow was simulated for all river reaches using daily runoff datasets for selected global climate models from 1950 to 2100. Changes in future projections of river flow, driven by climate change, were analyzed at specific river gauges throughout the Mississippi River Basin. Statistical analysis was conducted using the annual maximums of simulations to show recurrence intervals at key locations. The study compared the recurrence flood values based on the historical time period (1950-2005) and entire CMIP5 time period (1950-2099). Results show an increasing frequency of high flows and the magnitude of recurrence values through 2099. The study suggested that evaluation of extreme discharges should be considered.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.H33S2308T
- Keywords:
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- 1807 Climate impacts;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1817 Extreme events;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1821 Floods;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 4333 Disaster risk analysis and assessment;
- NATURAL HAZARDS