HR: 08:15h
AN: H41A-02    [Abstracts]
TI: Design Flood Estimation in the Presence of Nonstationarity: Overcoming the Limitations of Traditional Flood Frequency Analysis
AU: * Sivapalan, M
EM: sivapala@uiuc.edu
AF: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 220 Davenport Hall, 607 S. Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, United States
AU: Samuel, J M
EM: samuel@sese.uwa.edu.au
AF: University of Western Australia, School of Environmental Systems Engineering, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia
AB: Issues arising from climate change and long-term climate variability have become the focus of much recent research. Traditional flood frequency analysis assumes stationarity, and cannot account for the non-stationarity in flood frequency distributions caused by long-term climate variability and human-induced climatic or land use change. In this paper, we will specifically discuss their impacts of climate variability and change on flood frequencies. The analysis of the flood frequencies are investigated in semiarid-temperate and tropical landscapes in Australia, using the derived flood frequency approach. These approaches are driven by rainfall event sequences generated by a stochastic rainfall model coupled with a rainfall-runoff model that captured the water balance variability at a multiplicity of time scales ranging from event to seasonal, inter-annual and multi- decadal time scales. The study demonstrates that the multi-annual, multi-decadal trends and long term climate shifts have a significant impact upon the flood frequencies. On the basis of these results a new variation to traditional flood frequency estimation procedures, based on flood risk assessment, is proposed as a potential solution to overcome the limitations of the traditional flood frequency analysis.
DE: 1807 Climate impacts
DE: 1817 Extreme events
DE: 1821 Floods
DE: 1860 Streamflow
DE: 1876 Water budgets
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly