Quantification of climate change impact on dam failure risk under hydrological scenarios: a case study from a Spanish dam

Abstract

Abstract. Dam safety is increasingly subjected to the influence of climate change. Its impacts must be assessed through the integration of the various effects acting on each aspect, considering their interdependencies, rather than just a simple accumulation of separate impacts. This serves as a dam safety management supporting tool to assess the vulnerability of the dam to climate change and to define adaptation strategies under an evolutive dam failure risk management framework. This article presents a comprehensive quantitative assessment of the impacts of climate change on the safety of a Spanish dam under hydrological scenarios, integrating the various projected effects acting on each component of the risk, from the input hydrology to the consequences of the outflow hydrograph. In particular, the results of 21 regional climate models encompassing three Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) have been used to calculate the risk evolution of the dam until the end of the 21st century. Results show a progressive deterioration of the dam failure risk, for most of the cases contemplated, especially for the RCP2.6 and RCP4.5 scenarios. Moreover, the individual analysis of each risk component shows that the alteration of the expected inflows has the greater influence on the final risk. The approach followed in this paper can serve as a useful guidebook for dam owners and dam safety practitioners in the analysis of other study cases.

Preface: Natural hazard impacts on technological systems and infrastructures

“…Sayão et al (2020) also deal with dam safety but from a seismic hazard point of view. They introduce the issue of the visualization of databases, while Petrova (2020) and Frolova et al (2020) also deal with databases of natural hazard impacts on infrastructure, providing useful tools for further research. Williams et al (2020) conclude that the fragility functions show a trend of lower tsunami vulnerability (through lower probabilities of reaching or exceeding a given damage level) for road-use categories of potentially higher construction standards; bridges are more vulnerable to the impacts of tsunamis than roads; however, bridges are better designed to withstand the forces of tsunami loading and have a lower level of vulnerability at all hazard intensities (inundation depth) compared to buildings; culverts represent particularly vulnerable sections of roads.…”

“…The study areas vary from national and interregional scales in North America (Jeong et al, 2019), Brazil (Sayão et al, 2020), Chili, Japan (Williams et al, 2020), and the Russian Federation (Frolova et al, 2020;Petrova, 2020) to regional and local scales in Normandy, France (Braud et al, 2020), the province of Salamanca in Spain (Fluixá-Sanmartín et al, 2019), Bucharest in Romania (Toma-Danila et al, 2020), Hubei Province in China (Chen et al, 2019), and Ngazidja Island, NW of Madagascar (Mossoux et al, 2019).…”

“…Since more involvement of the humanities is needed in natural disaster research and the topic of the special issue builds on the "natural hazards and society" section of the EGU, the paper is a good enrichment of the SI. Frolova et al (2020) consider instead the application of an impact database for the example of Russia, as in Petrova (2020). The database is available upon special request for international projects, thus constituting an infrastructure itself for later projects.…”

Adaptation strategies of dam safety management to new climate change scenarios informed by risk indicators

“…Such models serve also as a supporting tool to assess the effects on risk imposed by climate change. Refer to Fluixá-Sanmartín et al (2018, 2019c for a theoretical and practical guidance on the use of risk models for the calculation of dam risk evolution under this approach.…”

“…In Fluixá-Sanmartín et al (2019c), a risk model of the dam was used to compute the associated failure risks for the present situation and for future climate scenarios. This risk model was set up with iPresas software (iPresas 2019), a tool for quantitative risk calculation based on event trees to compute failure probability and risk.…”