Adaptive Management of Water Supply Infrastructure for Persistent Anomalies versus Climate Trends

该项目通过建立一种新的适应性供水基础设施规划管理方法，将多年气候波动对水资源供应的影响纳入其中，解决了关键基础设施部门面临的气候挑战。在气候变化的情况下，要在全球范围内保持可靠的供水，就需要在水务部门进行大规模的基础设施投资。为了以较低的成本实现复原力，已经开发了适应性管理方法来监测降水模式的逐渐变化，以指导适应。然而，现有的适应性管理方法受到多年气候波动的影响，这使得从近期观测推断长期趋势变得困难。该基金支持的研究旨在通过将多年振荡的气候科学与水资源管理的决策支持模型相结合来解决这一差距。这项研究的结果有望帮助水资源规划者确定低成本、适应性的方法来维持供水的可靠性。研究小组将与水资源规划者合作，以确保这项研究对决策有用。此外，这笔赠款还将支持有关水资源管理的新的互动式教育材料。本项目为供水规划设计了新的适应性管理策略，能够应对气候趋势的不确定性、多年大规模气候波动和年变率。它将开发一种方法，将降水不确定性分解为这三个时间尺度，并量化未来的机会，以减少每个时间尺度的不确定性。这种不确定性表征将被整合到水资源系统的随机动态优化模型中。该方法将用于评估不同适应策略组合的潜力，包括供水基础设施在时间、规模、模块化和运营方面的灵活性，以解决未来降水不确定性的不同时间尺度。通过将该方法应用于撒哈拉以南非洲地区降水变化模式对比鲜明的河流流域，该项目将建立有关降水变化的不同时间模式如何影响水利基础设施规划、设计和运营的适应性方法的理论。这一新知识可以帮助水资源规划者瞄准供水基础设施投资，以支持低成本供水的可靠性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project addresses climate challenges faced by critical infrastructure sectors by establishing a new adaptive management approach to water supply infrastructure planning that incorporate the impacts of multi-year climate oscillations on water availability. Large scale infrastructure investments in the water sector will be needed to maintain reliable water supply globally in a changing climate. To enable resilience at lower cost, adaptive management approaches have been developed to monitor gradual changes in precipitation patterns to guide adaptations. However, existing adaptive management approaches are confounded by the presence of multi-year climate oscillations, which make it difficult to infer long-term trends from near-term observations. This grant supports research that seeks to address this gap by integrating climate science on multi-year oscillations with decision-support modeling for water resources management. The outcome of this research is expected to help water planners identify low-cost, adaptive approaches to maintain water supply reliability. The research team will partner with water planners to make sure the research is useful for decision-making. Additionally, the grant will support new interactive educational materials in water resources management.This project designs new adaptive management strategies for water supply planning that can address uncertainty in climate trends, multi-year large-scale climate oscillations, and annual variability. It will develop an approach for decomposing precipitation uncertainty into these three timescales and quantifying future opportunities to reduce uncertainty in each timescale. This uncertainty characterization will be integrated into stochastic dynamic optimization models of water resource systems. This approach will be used to assess the potential for different combinations of adaptive strategies including flexibility in the timing, sizing, modularity, and operations of water supply infrastructure to address the different timescales of uncertainty in future precipitation. By applying this approach to river basins in sub-Saharan Africa with contrasting patterns of precipitation variability, the project will build theory on how different temporal patterns of precipitation variability affect adaptive approaches to water infrastructure planning, design, and operations. This new knowledge can help water planners target water supply infrastructure investment to support low-cost water supply reliability.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.