Climate-Resilience of Dams: Canadian Perspectives and Design Flood Estimation Guidelines

Código

I-EBHE0061

Autores

Muhammad Naveed Khaliq

Tema

WG 1.10: Hydrologic Design - Solutions & Communication

Resumo

Canada has a long history of recurrent flooding, which has resulted in significant damage and large government disaster assistance disbursements. The most expensive flood in Canada was the 2013 Alberta flood, which resulted in total estimated losses of over five billion dollars, according to the Canadian disaster database. There is an increasing body of literature, suggesting that future climate change will alter precipitation and streamflow characteristics, snowpack, and snowmelt timing and magnitude. Extreme inflows that exceed dam discharge and storage capacity can lead to dam breach, posing significant risks to lives and properties on the downstream. Dams constructed decades ago are specifically vulnerable to unprecedented flood events. Therefore, in addition to other actions, an important step for enhancing and assessing climate-resilience of dams is to develop and adopt climate change informed approaches for estimating design floods. This contribution focuses on Canadian efforts pertaining to the development of design flood estimation guidelines in order to address the challenges of future climate change.