Published In

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2011

Subjects

Climatic changes, Environmental management, City planning -- Environmental aspects, Flood damage prevention

Abstract

How will the combined impacts of land use change, climate change, and hydrologic modeling influence changes in urban flood frequency and what is the main uncertainty source of the results? Will such changes differ by catchment with different degrees of current and future urban development? We attempt to answer these questions in two catchments with different degrees of urbanization, the Fanno catchment with 84% urban land use and the Johnson catchment with 36% urban land use, both located in the Pacific Northwest of the US. Five uncertainty sources – general circulation model (GCM) structures, future greenhouse gas (GHG) emission scenarios, land use change scenarios, natural variability, and hydrologic model parameters – are considered to compare the relative source of uncertainty in flood frequency projections. Two land use change scenarios, conservation and development, representing possible future land use changes are used for analysis. Results show the highest increase in flood frequency under the combination of medium high GHG emission (A1B) and development scenarios, and the lowest increase under the combination of low GHG emission (B1) and conservation scenarios. Although the combined impact is more significant to flood frequency change than individual scenarios, it does not linearly

Description

This is the publisher's final pdf. Originally published in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (http://www.hydrology-and-earth-system-sciences.net/home.html) and is copyrighted by American Geophysical Union (http://www.agu.org/)

DOI

10.5194/hess-15-617-2011

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/7187

Publisher

Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union.

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