Michelle Ho, Declan O’Shea1, Conrad Wasko1, Rory Nathan, Ashish Sharma
A key challenge to the continued safe operation, maintenance, and potential upgrades of Australia’s portfolio of large dams is understanding how climate change will impact extreme floods. In this work, we assess the impacts of climate change on dam overtopping flood risk for 18 dams in Australia spanning a variety of climate and rainfall
zones and natural resource management regions. We examine the impacts of climate change resulting from three key flood factors namely 1. rainfall depth; 2. storm temporal
patterns; and 3. rainfall losses. The impact of these factors on the overtopping risks of dams are examined both individually and in combination. We found that for all dams, changes in rainfall depth had the largest impact. For many dams, changes in rainfall depth under a 4°C increase in global temperature increase the risk of overtopping by over an order of magnitude. In contrast, changes in storm temporal patterns and rainfall losses often resulted in a slight decrease in the risk of dam overtopping and served to modulate the impact of increased storm depths under climate change. Overall, we found that if global temperatures increase by 4°C then the median risk of overtopping will increase by a factor of around 6 across the 18 dams examined.
$15.00
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