Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 111, Issue 9, Pages 3257-3261Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1302078110
Keywords
climate impacts; river flows; extremes
Categories
Funding
- German Federal Ministry of Education and Research [01LS1201A]
- Joint UK Department of Energy and Climate Change/Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme [GA01101]
- Ministry of the Environment, Japan [S-10]
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI [23226012]
- Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology SOUSEI Program
- Natural Environment Research Council [ceh010022] Funding Source: researchfish
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [23226012] Funding Source: KAKEN
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Climate change due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of precipitation events, which is likely to affect the probability of flooding into the future. In this paper we use river flow simulations from nine global hydrology and land surface models to explore uncertainties in the potential impacts of climate change on flood hazard at global scale. As an indicator of flood hazard we looked at changes in the 30-y return level of 5-d average peak flows under representative concentration pathway RCP8.5 at the end of this century. Not everywhere does climate change result in an increase in flood hazard: decreases in the magnitude and frequency of the 30-y return level of river flow occur at roughly one-third (20-45%) of the global land grid points, particularly in areas where the hydro-graph is dominated by the snowmelt flood peak in spring. In most model experiments, however, an increase in flooding frequency was found in more than half of the grid points. The current 30-y flood peak is projected to occur in more than 1 in 5 y across 5-30% of land grid points. The large-scale patterns of change are remarkably consistent among impact models and even the driving climate models, but at local scale and in individual river basins there can be disagreement even on the sign of change, indicating large modeling uncertainty which needs to be taken into account in local adaptation studies.
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