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Project properties |
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| Title | A Better Exploration of Flood Risks Across Europe in a Changing Climate |
| Group | Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management Group |
| Project type | thesis |
| Credits | 36 |
| Supervisor(s) | Svenja Fischer, Ted Buskop (Deltares) |
| Examiner(s) | |
| Contact info | |
| Begin date | 2024/11/04 |
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| Description | A changing climate will bring many challenges to regions throughout Europe. The IPCC identifies flooding as one of Europe’s key risks. It is, therefore, important that regions start to prepare for these changes. However, this is complicated by uncertainties in local responses in a changing climate, leading to different flood risks. Many circulation models exist that simulate future climate patterns and they all have their own tuning of physical processes leading to large precipitation differences to the same amount of emitted emissions by society. An often-used approach to deal with this uncertainty is to take multi-model means of climate signals found in the circulation models for a specific climate emission scenario. However, it has been shown that this severely limits the risk exploration for regions.
Therefore, it can be more insightful to cluster models based on their behaviour instead of emission scenario runs. For some regions, this can increase the explored risk range up to a factor of 9, allowing them to better prepare for the future. Considering a wider range of scenarios allows them to design robust measures that work well across the potential future. Currently, the clustering method has been applied to an individual region as a proof of concept. However, we would like to scale this up to a diverse set of climatological regions and basins so we can explore and learn about climate uncertainties for many regions. The research process will consist of the following steps using the programming language Python. 1. Defining and selecting the regions/basins of interest 2. Extracting climate signals for regions 3. Create time series for this new climate using a weather generator 4. Hydrological modelling 5. Analysing the main climate impact drivers of the regions 6. Clustering GCMs on climate impact drivers per region and creating new scenarios per region 7. Spatial mapping of hazard increase per scenario The research will take place at water research institute Deltares within the ‘Climate Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction’ and ‘Hydrology’ departments, where you will have access to different experts in the field. The project is part of the EU Horizon research project CLIMAAX, where an international team of organisations works together to enhance climate risk assessments for European regions. There is the option to work together (remotely) with specific case study regions from the project. |
| Used skills | Python, hydrologic modelling |
| Requirements | |