Quantification of future risk of flooding under climate change using probabilistic framework analysis

Rainfall patterns are expected to change rapidly due to climate change the following decades. In particular climate model projections indicate that rainfall extremes, either in terms of intense evens or droughts are expected to rise in the near future.
A very important feature of this behaviour is the expected increase of short time-scale rainfall extremes, rising in various locations in the world with a rate of ~14%/°C, twice as much as the water holding capacity of the air. Such an increase is expected to alter the hydrological cycle and result to more intense flooding. The goal of this PhD project is to quantify the future risk of flooding under climate change using a probabilistic framework analysis. The tasks that the PhD student will carry over are:

Task 1: Weather data analysis and development of a stochastic weather generator
In the first task a stochastic weather generator that reproduces the coupled behaviour of the simultaneous temperature and extreme precipitation increase will be built based on the supervisor’s previous research. Part of the task will be the statistical analysis of meteorological and reanalysis data to identify the patterns of expected changes of extremes with temperature and the establishment of physical links for the occurrence of those patterns. The generator will ultimately be used in conjunction with the last generation climate model results in order to generate stochastic ensembles for future weather at spatial and temporal scales relevant for hydrological applications.

Task 2: Probabilistic Flood Risk assessment
In the second task, the future weather scenarios will be used to quantify the probability of increased flood risk in the near future. In particular a coupled physically based eco-hydrological model will be used to identify the impacts of the altered temporal dynamics of precipitation on the various fluxes of the water and carbon cycles, focusing on soil moisture dynamics, vegetation responses and ultimately runoff generation. The analysis will be carried out for a number of locations across the world with distinctly different climates and expected changes in precipitation. The overall project synthesis will result to a quantification of the potential increase of flood risk.