Assessing the Effects of Climate Change on the Intensity and Magnitude of Floods in Future Periods

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the trend of hydro-climatic variables, detect the occurrence of climate change and subscale the climatic variables during future periods and evaluate the intensity and magnitude of future floods. The trend of hydroclimatic variables was first investigated using Mann-Kendall and Sen tests. Then, the output data of maximum temperature, minimum temperature and precipitation of CANESM2 general circulation model were sub-scaled under RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 climate change scenarios using SDSM 4.2.9 model. Later, HEC-HMS model was used to evaluate the intensity and magnitude of events in the Emameh watershed in future periods. The results showed that 20.8 and 14.6% of the maximum temperature and minimum temperature series had a significant upward trend. While 5.5% of the rainfall time series had a significant upward trend. Therefore, unlike the temperature variable, the monthly precipitation variable did not have a definite trend during the observation period as in future periods, in some months it showed an increasing trend and in some months it showed a decreasing trend. However, the maximum and minimum temperatures under the diffusion scenarios increased in the following periods. The peak flow and volume ​​of the simulated floods, under the most severe events in each period, was significantly smaller for future periods than for the observation period. Comparison of the most severe events with each other in different periods showed an increase in the volume and magnitude of the flood in the RCP2.6 scenario compared with RCP8.5. Therefore, in the context of climate change, the number of floods and their destructive power has increased and managers and planners are recommended to pay attention to this, especially in urban areas.

Keywords

• canesm2 model
• emameh watershed
• rainfall-runoff modeling
• sdsm
• sub-scaling