Linking Climate Change to Urban Water Infrastructure Design and Management: An Integrated Conceptual Modeling Framework for Multi-scale Simulation of Extreme Rainfall Processes

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Canada has significant investments in urban water infrastructures (e.g., storm drainage and flood management systems). Every day, Canadians rely on these systems to protect lives, property, and natural water environment. These infrastructures have reduced the vulnerability of the cities, but at the same time could make them more vulnerable to climate extremes, due to the lack of consideration of what might occur when the design criteria are exceeded. Furthermore, recent assessment reports on climate change for Canada have indicated a very strong likelihood of a significant increase in the occurrence and intensity of extreme storms for future periods. Consequently, research on developing innovative approaches for limiting and adapting climate change impacts on urban water infrastructures is highly critical due to substantial investments involved. However, it has been widely recognized that the main difficulty in dealing with climate change impacts for urban areas is "how to estimate accurately the changes in the hydrologic processes at the urban basin scale projected by global/regional climate models because these models do not contain an adequate description of the rainfall governing processes at relevant high temporal and spatial resolutions as required by the impact and adaptation studies." This necessitates some form of downscaling of the climate model simulations from a coarse (20-300 km) spatial resolution down to much finer spatial grids, and even point values if changes in local hydrologic processes are to be assessed. In addition, the required time scales for assessing the climate change impacts on the urban rainfall processes are usually less than one day. Therefore, the overall objective of this study is to develop "an integrated climate-urban hydrologic processes modeling framework" to establish accurately the linkages between coarse-scale climate projections and extreme hydrologic variables at a given location. The development of this framework will provide an essential tool for understanding the possible changes in key urban hydrologic processes (rainfall, temperature, and runoff) due to climate change to develop more cost-effective design procedures and more accurate vulnerability assessment methods for urban water systems. It is therefore expected that results of this research will enhance our understanding of climate variability and their effects in urban regions, will provide improved tools and methods for high-quality impact assessment studies, and ultimately will help policy-makers in developing appropriate adaptive strategies and robust mitigating policies for more effective management of our urban water systems. Our pioneering research work in this research area is currently being nominated for the NSERC Donna Strickland Prize for Societal Impact of Natural Sciences and Engineering Research to recognize the outstanding research contribution that has led to exceptional benefits for Canadian society, environment, and economy.