Impact of climate change on flood flows in river catchments
A study applying climate change scenarios to selected catchments to improve the scientific basis for climate change guidance in flood management.
Documents
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Details
The project applies a wide range of climate change scenarios to selected catchments. This is done to improve the scientific basis for guidance on climate change given to the flood management community.
The final report details the approach of the research. This was to apply the climate changes predicted in the UKCIP02 Technical Report (Hulme et al. 2002) into current models of how water behaves (hydrology models). This was done to improve our understanding of what the effects of those changes might be.
Two different hydrology models were used to account for the differences between catchments. The report outlines uncertainties and the assumptions which had to be made during the modelling.
The report also describes the catchments studied and the methods used to construct the various climate change scenarios. It discussed the rainfall data used to drive the hydrological models for the 1961 to 1990 baseline period and the future time periods (the 2050s and the 2080s).
This project ran from 2001 to 2004.