Hydroclimatic extremes, such as floods and droughts, affect aspects of our lives and the environment including energy, hydropower, agriculture, transportation, urban life, and human health and safety. Climate studies indicate that the risk of increased flooding and/or more severe droughts will be higher in the future than today, causing increased fatalities, environmental degradation, and economic losses. Using a suite of innovative approaches this book quantifies the changes in projected hydroclimatic extremes and illustrates their impacts in several locations in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Hydroclimatic extremes, such as floods and droughts, affect aspects of our lives and the environment including energy, hydropower, agriculture, transportation, urban life, and human health and safety. Climate studies indicate that the risk of increased flooding and/or more severe droughts will be higher in the future than today, causing increased fatalities, environmental degradation, and economic losses. Using a suite of innovative approaches this book quantifies the changes in projected hydroclimatic extremes and illustrates their impacts in several locations in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Extreme Hydrology and Climate Variability: Monitoring, Modelling, Adaptation and Mitigation is a compilation of contributions by experts from around the world who discuss extreme hydrology topics, from monitoring, to modeling and management. With extreme climatic and hydrologic events becoming so frequent, this book is a critical source, adding knowledge to the science of extreme hydrology. Topics covered include hydrometeorology monitoring, climate variability and trends, hydrological variability and trends, landscape dynamics, droughts, flood processes, and extreme events management, adaptation and mitigation. Each of the book's chapters provide background and theoretical foundations followed by approaches used and results of the applied studies. This book will be highly used by water resource managers and extreme event researchers who are interested in understanding the processes and teleconnectivity of large-scale climate dynamics and extreme events, predictability, simulation and intervention measures. - Presents datasets used and methods followed to support the findings included, allowing readers to follow these steps in their own research - Provides variable methodological approaches, thus giving the reader multiple hydrological modeling information to use in their work - Includes a variety of case studies, thus making the context of the book relatable to everyday working situations for those studying extreme hydrology - Discusses extreme event management, including adaption and mitigation

This open access book discusses the impact of human-induced global climate change on the regional climate and monsoons of the Indian subcontinent, adjoining Indian Ocean and the Himalayas. It documents the regional climate change projections based on the climate models used in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and climate change modeling studies using the IITM Earth System Model (ESM) and CORDEX South Asia datasets. The IPCC assessment reports, published every 6–7 years, constitute important reference materials for major policy decisions on climate change, adaptation, and mitigation. While the IPCC assessment reports largely provide a global perspective on climate change, the focus on regional climate change aspects is considerably limited. The effects of climate change over the Indian subcontinent involve complex physical processes on different space and time scales, especially given that the mean climate of this region is generally shaped by the Indian monsoon and the unique high-elevation geographical features such as the Himalayas, the Western Ghats, the Tibetan Plateau and the adjoining Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, and Bay of Bengal. This book also presents policy relevant information based on robust scientific analysis and assessments of the observed and projected future climate change over the Indian region.

One important aspect related to the management of water resources under future climate variation is the occurrence of extreme precipitation events. In order to prepare for extreme events, namely floods and droughts, it is important to understand how future climate variability will influence the occurrence of such events. Recent advancements in regional climate modeling efforts provide additional resources for investigating the occurrence of extreme events at scales that are appropriate for regional hydrologic modeling. This study utilizes data from three Regional Climate Models (RCMs), each driven by the same General Circulation Model (GCM) as well as a reanalysis dataset, all of which was made available by the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP). A comparison between observed historical precipitation events and NARCCAP modeled historical conditions over Oregon's Willamette River basin was performed. This comparison is required in order to investigate the reliability of regional climate modeling efforts. Datasets representing future climate signal scenarios, also provided by NARCCAP, were then compared to historical data to provide an estimate of the variability in extreme event occurrence and severity within the basin. Analysis determining magnitudes of two, five, ten and twenty-five year return level estimates, as well as parameters corresponding to a representative Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution, were determined. The results demonstrate the importance of the applied initial/boundary driving conditions, the need for multi-model ensemble analysis due to RCM variability, and the need for further downscaling and bias correction methods to RCM datasets when investigating watershed scale phenomena.

year simulations in order to separate noise in the system from the climate change signal. Several contributing papers focused on case studies using Regional Climate Models (RCMs) linked to hydrological models, applied to the analysis of runoff under conditions of convective activity and extreme precipitation, in regions of complex topography, or stakeholder-driven investigations such as water runoff simulations in Quebec undertaken for a major utility. Thorough analyses of GCM results for the Century were reported at the Workshop, in order to illustrate the improvements in model results which have taken place in recent years, and the increasing confidence with which the models can be used for projecting climatic change in coming decades. However, there is still much room for improvement; there is also a need to address more fully the manner in which climate and impacts models (e. g. , hydrological models) can be linked, in terms of consistency and the overlap between different scales, the underlying physical assumptions, and the parameterizations used. Session 2 was devoted to the two extremes of water resources, namely floods and droughts, the focus here being to identify the climate change component in river floods. These have significant economic implications, as was shown by several scientists from Western and Central Europe. Many long time series have been studied worldwide with the aim of detection of nonstationarities, yet there is no conclusive evidence of climate-related changes in flow records, in general.

Extreme weather and climate events, interacting with exposed and vulnerable human and natural systems, can lead to disasters. This Special Report explores the social as well as physical dimensions of weather- and climate-related disasters, considering opportunities for managing risks at local to international scales. SREX was approved and accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on 18 November 2011 in Kampala, Uganda.