Impacts of Land Cover and Climate Changes on Peak Floods Probability Distribution Function
18 Pages Posted: 4 Sep 2014
Date Written: November 2013
Abstract
Climate and land cover are the main regulators of discharge formation. We combined here 5 alternative land cover case with 2 different precipitation scenarios. Land cover scenarios are: (a) present land cover according to CORINE 2006 maps, (b) ICES scenario at 2050, (c) IMAGE scenario at 2050, (d) cementification scenario C1 and (e) cementification scenario C2. The ICES and IMAGE scenarios are based on consideration of economy and population growth, cementification scenarios 1 and 2 are intended as exemplificative what-if scenarios for urbanization of rural areas. Precipitation is modelled as (a) the observed one and (b) increasing of 10% the average value. Peak flood probability distributions are analytically for each of the 10 land cover-climate combinations. The case study is the Secchia river basin in Emilia Romagna region. Results show that in absence of changes in the precipitation regime, the peak flood associated to low return period (<25 years) show a higher increase in percentage than those associated to higher return periods. If the land cover changes are combined with an increase of the precipitation, changes in peak flood are almost the double in percentage.
Keywords: Climate change, Land cover change, Peak flood probability
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