52 research outputs found
Possible climate change impacts on water resources availability in a large semi-arid catchment in Northeast Brazil.
The semiarid region of Northeast Brazil is characterized by water scarcity, vulnerability of natural resources, and pronounced climatic variability. An integrated model has been developed to simulate this complex situation with an emphasis on a large-scale representation of hydrological processes and on the sensitivity to climate change. Regional climate change scenarios were obtained by empirical downscaling with large-scale climate information from different GCMs which differ strongly in their projections for future precipitation. The results show that due to these differences, it is still impossible to give quantitative values of the water availability in a forecast sense, i.e. to assign probabilities to the simulated results. However, it becomes clear that efficient and ecologically sound water management is a key question for further development. The results show that, independent of the climate change, agriculture is more vulnerable to drought impacts in the case of rainfed compared to irrigated farming. However, the capacity of irrigation and water infrastructure to enhance resilience with respect to climatic fluctuations is significantly constrained in the case of a negative precipitation trend
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Increasing compound warm spells and droughts in the Mediterranean Basin
The co-occurrence of warm spells and droughts can lead to detrimental socio-economic and ecological impacts, largely surpassing the impacts of either warm spells or droughts alone. We quantify changes in the number of compound warm spells and droughts from 1979 to 2018 in the Mediterranean Basin using the ERA5 data set. We analyse two types of compound events: 1) warm season compound events, which are extreme in absolute terms in the warm season from May to October and 2) year-round deseasonalised compound events, which are extreme in relative terms respective to the time of the year. The number of compound events increases significantly and especially warm spells are increasing strongly â with an annual growth rates of 3.9 (3.5) % for warm season (deseasonalised) compound events and 4.6 (4.4) % for warm spells â, whereas for droughts the change is more ambiguous depending on the applied definition. Therefore, the rise in the number of compound events is primarily driven by temperature changes and not the lack of precipitation. The months July and August show the highest increases in warm season compound events, whereas the highest increases of deseasonalised compound events occur in spring and early summer. This increase in deseasonalised compound events can potentially have a significant impact on the functioning of Mediterranean ecosystems as this is the peak phase of ecosystem productivity and a vital phenophase
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How to Tailor My ProcessâBased Hydrological Model? Dynamic Identifiability Analysis of Flexible Model Structures
In the field of hydrological modeling, many alternative representations of natural processes exist. Choosing specific process formulations when building a hydrological model is therefore associated with a high degree of ambiguity and subjectivity. In addition, the numerical integration of the underlying differential equations and parametrization of model structures influence model performance. Identifiability analysis may provide guidance by constraining the a priori range of alternatives based on observations. In this work, a flexible simulation environment is used to build an ensemble of semidistributed, process-based hydrological model configurations with alternative process representations, numerical integration schemes, and model parametrizations in an integrated manner. The flexible simulation environment is coupled with an approach for dynamic identifiability analysis. The objective is to investigate the applicability of the framework to identify the most adequate model. While an optimal model configuration could not be clearly distinguished, interesting results were obtained when relating model identifiability with hydro-meteorological boundary conditions. For instance, we tested the Penman-Monteith and Shuttleworth & Wallace evapotranspiration models and found that the former performs better under wet and the latter under dry conditions. Parametrization of model structures plays a dominant role as it can compensate for inadequate process representations and poor numerical solvers. Therefore, it was found that numerical solvers of high order of accuracy do often, though not necessarily, lead to better model performance. The proposed coupled framework proved to be a straightforward diagnostic tool for model building and hypotheses testing and shows potential for more in-depth analysis of process implementations and catchment functioning
Increasing compound warm spells and droughts in the Mediterranean Basin
The co-occurrence of warm spells and droughts can lead to detrimental socio-economic and ecological impacts, largely surpassing the impacts of either warm spells or droughts alone. We quantify changes in the number of compound warm spells and droughts from 1979 to 2018 in the Mediterranean Basin using the ERA5 data set. We analyse two types of compound events: 1) warm season compound events, which are extreme in absolute terms in the warm season from May to October and 2) year-round deseasonalised compound events, which are extreme in relative terms respective to the time of the year. The number of compound events increases significantly and especially warm spells are increasing strongly â with an annual growth rates of 3.9 (3.5) % for warm season (deseasonalised) compound events and 4.6 (4.4) % for warm spells â, whereas for droughts the change is more ambiguous depending on the applied definition. Therefore, the rise in the number of compound events is primarily driven by temperature changes and not the lack of precipitation. The months July and August show the highest increases in warm season compound events, whereas the highest increases of deseasonalised compound events occur in spring and early summer. This increase in deseasonalised compound events can potentially have a significant impact on the functioning of Mediterranean ecosystems as this is the peak phase of ecosystem productivity and a vital phenophase.DFG, 251036843, GRK 2043: Naturgefahren und Risiken in einer Welt im Wande
Toward an adequate level of detail in flood risk assessments
Flood risk assessments require different disciplines to understand and model the underlying components hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. Many methods and data sets have been refined considerably to cover more details of spatial, temporal, or process information. We compile case studies indicating that refined methods and data have a considerable effect on the overall assessment of flood risk. But are these improvements worth the effort? The adequate level of detail is typically unknown and prioritization of improvements in a specific component is hampered by the lack of an overarching view on flood risk. Consequently, creating the dilemma of potentially being too greedy or too wasteful with the resources available for a risk assessment. A âsweet spotâ between those two would use methods and data sets that cover all relevant known processes without using resources inefficiently. We provide three key questions as a qualitative guidance toward this âsweet spot.â For quantitative decision support, more overarching case studies in various contexts are needed to reveal the sensitivity of the overall flood risk to individual components. This could also support the anticipation of unforeseen events like the flood event in Germany and Belgium in 2021 and increase the reliability of flood risk assessments
Hochwasser und Sturzfluten an FlĂŒssen in Deutschland
Flusshochwasser werden in lokale und plotzliche Sturzfluten und in Hochwasser an groseren Flussen unterschieden. Fur verschiedene Hochwasserindikatoren und Flusseinzugsgebiete ergeben sich erhebliche Unterschiede, wobei sowohl uberwiegend aus Regen als auch uberwiegend aus Schmelzwasser gespeiste Hochwasserereignisse betrachtet werden. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit finden Hochwasserereignisse an Rhein, Elbe, Weser und Ems sowie die Entwicklung von Sturzfluten infolge von Extremniederschlagen kurzer Dauer, wobei die Beobachtungen und Trends zu Modellierungsergebnissen in Beziehung gesetzt werden. Auch die Notwendigkeit von Anpassungsmasnahmen aufgrund uberwiegend positiver Trends wird diskutiert
Soil moisture estimation using a multi-angular modified three component polarimetric decomposition
In this paper a modified three component polarimetric
decomposition incorporating multi-angular acquisitions is
developed to estimate soil moisture under vegetation
cover over agricultural areas. The approach is applied on
fully-polarimetric L-band data acquired by DLRâs
airborne E-SAR sensor in the frame of the OPAQUE
campaign conducted in May 2008 in the WeiĂeritz
catchment area, near Dresden, Germany. The results for
the estimated soil moisture from the overlapping area of
the flight strips demonstrate a significant increase of the
inversion rate, if more than one acquisition is used. The
inverted soil moisture values are validated against in situ
measurements for five test fields with different crop types
resulting in an RMSE of approximately 7vol.% for
different incidence angle constellations. Finally the results
show how topographic effects in the soil moisture
retrieval can be compensated by multi-angular
constellations
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