Global warming is expected to intensify the hydrological cycle and lead to more frequent and intense precipitation events. Projections of more intense rainfall events naturally lead to assumptions that flooding in human communities will also increase, but flood response to precipitation events can vary widely. While urban areas have many impervious surfaces and thus high runoff ratios, river response to rainfall events over rural and natural land cover is strongly mediated by watershed antecedent conditions. For example, heavy precipitation may not produce flooding during warm season months when soil moisture is low and evapotranspiration is high. Conversely, moderate rain events can generate large floods if they fall on snow and frozen ground, or on saturated ground during leaf-off conditions. Further complicating our ability to predict how changes in precipitation will translate to river floods is the potential for climate change to affect these mediating influences—like changing the phenology of deciduous plants or reducing snow cover. Human communities and infrastructure are found across watersheds with a wide range of land cover types from natural to urban, and thus are exposed to both urban and river flooding. Thus a major challenge for developing flood-resilient communities in response to future climate change is understanding both kinds of flood response to heavy precipitation, and how they may interact in different environments. This session seeks contributions addressing recent research advances, technological developments, and management practices associated with flood response to heavy precipitation events expected with climate change. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): understanding urban flooding dynamics under heavy precipitation, examining the relationship between precipitation magnitude or intensity and river flood magnitude, predicting urban and more natural river floods under climate change, understanding and/or predicting compound flood risks in urban settings, and flooding risk assessment and communication.
J57.4
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