Climate‐Induced Changes in the Risk of Hydrological Failure of Major Dams in California

Mallakpour, Iman; AghaKouchak, Amir; Sadegh, Mojtaba

doi:10.1029/2018gl081888

Cited by 52 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…The aging dam landscape faces new temperature, snow, discharge, and floods patterns that increase the risk of hydrological failure 40 , 41 . To maintain historical levels of flood protection in the face of climate change, new dam release operations will be required.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Role of dams in reducing global flood exposure under climate change

et al. 2021

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Globally, flood risk is projected to increase in the future due to climate change and population growth. Here, we quantify the role of dams in flood mitigation, previously unaccounted for in global flood studies, by simulating the floodplain dynamics and flow regulation by dams. We show that, ignoring flow regulation by dams, the average number of people exposed to flooding below dams amount to 9.1 and 15.3 million per year, by the end of the 21st century (holding population constant), for the representative concentration pathway (RCP) 2.6 and 6.0, respectively. Accounting for dams reduces the number of people exposed to floods by 20.6 and 12.9% (for RCP2.6 and RCP6.0, respectively). While environmental problems caused by dams warrant further investigations, our results indicate that consideration of dams significantly affect the estimation of future population exposure to flood, emphasizing the need to integrate them in model-based impact analysis of climate change.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Role of dams in reducing global flood exposure under climate change

et al. 2021

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“…Although not the subject of this paper, the impacts of climate change on reservoir operators go well beyond changes in water supply. For example, historic and projected increases in heavy rain events may alter the safety margins of existing dams and require retrofitting or reduced conservation pool size (Mallakpour et al, 2019).…”

Section: Adapting Reservoir Management To a Changing Climatementioning

confidence: 99%

Unprecedented Drought Challenges for Texas Water Resources in a Changing Climate: What Do Researchers and Stakeholders Need to Know?

et al. 2020

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Long‐range water planning is complicated by factors that are rapidly changing in the 21st century, including climate, population, and water use. Here, we analyze climate factors and drought projections for Texas as an example of a diverse society straddling an aridity gradient to examine how the projections can best serve water stakeholder needs. We find that climate models are robust in projecting drying of summer‐season soil moisture and decreasing reservoir supplies for both the eastern and western portions of Texas during the 21st century. Further, projections indicate drier conditions during the latter half of the 21st century than even the most arid centuries of the last 1,000 years that included megadroughts. To illustrate how accounting for drought nonstationarity may increase water resiliency, we consider generalized case studies involving four key stakeholder groups: agricultural producers, large surface water suppliers, small groundwater management districts, and regional water planning districts. We also examine an example of customized climate information being used as input to long‐range water planning. We find that while stakeholders value the quantitative capability of climate model outputs, more specific climate‐related information better supports resilience planning across multiple stakeholder groups. New suites of tools could provide necessary capacity for both short‐ and long‐term, stakeholder‐specific adaptive planning.

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“…Floods are one of the major natural disasters inflicting catastrophic damages on society and ecosystems and even causing millions of deaths (Bevacqua et al., 2017; Carvalho & Wang, 2019; Mallakpour et al., 2019). The 2017 California floods, for example, forced evacuations for thousands of people, while the Mississippi River floods of 2019 caused up to $20 billion in economic losses and at least 12 deaths (Smith, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%