Joint Poster Session 3 Heavy Precipitation and Flood Risk Under a Changing Climate

Wednesday, 15 January 2020: 4:00 PM-6:00 PM
Hosts: (Joint between the 34th Conference on Hydrology; and the 33rd Conference on Climate Variability and Change )
Chair:
Xander Wang, University of Prince Edward Island, School of Climate Change and Adaptation, Charlottetown, PE
Cochairs:
Glenn Hodgkins, USGS, New England Water Science Center, Maine Office, Augusta, ME; Ellen Mecray, NESDIS, Norton, MA; Arthur T. DeGaetano, Cornell Univ., Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Ithaca, NY and Mathias J. Collins, NOAA, National Marine Fisheries Service, Gloucester, MA

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.

Papers:
Using a WRF Physics Ensemble to Investigate the Behavior of a Flood-Producing Heavy Rainstorm in Current and Future Environments
J. Mike Madden, North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC; and C. Jung, W. A. Robinson, and G. M. Lackmann

An Event-Based Downscaling Approach to Modeling Extreme Cloudburst Precipitation Events
Geneva M. E. Gray, EPA, Research Triangle Park, NC; and K. E. Kunkel, T. L. Spero, J. H. Bowden, A. M. Jalowska, and M. S. Mallard

Periodicity of 241-year precipitation at Seoul in summer 1778-2018
Jae Won LEE, KMA, Incheon, Korea, Republic of (South); and D. S. KIM

Considering Uncertainty in Projections of Hydrological Extremes under Climate Change Scenarios in the Catskill Mountains Associated with Decadal Scale Variability
Allan Frei, City University of New York, New York, NY; and E. Owens, R. Gelda, R. Mukundan, J. Gass, and J. Chen

Trends in the Spatial Extent of Daily Extreme Precipitation Totals
Art DeGaetano, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; and G. S. Mooers and T. Favata

Assessing Future Flood Risk Toward a Sustainable City and Campus Storm-water and Landscape Ecology Plan: A Cambridge and MIT Case Study
C. Adam Schlosser, MIT, Cambridge, MA; and K. Strzepek, X. Gao, M. Preston, and B. Goldberg

The Historical 2019 Spring Flood Season and Central Region's ROC Response
Stephanie D. Sipprell, NWS Central Region Headquarters, Kansas City, MO; and W. L. Pearson and K. P. Allen

Effects of climate, regulation, and urbanization on historical flood trends in the United States
Glenn Hodgkins, USGS, Augusta, ME; and R. Dudley, S. A. Archfield, and B. Renard

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