Identification

Title

Quantifying the risk of extreme events under climate change

Abstract

We are all familiar with the proverbial "100-year flood," a concept instrumental in engineering design for water resources management. This concept, generally termed a "return level" corresponding to a specified "return period," is based on the assumption of an unchanging (or "stationary") climate. In particular, Emil Gumbel, a pioneer in the application of the statistics of extremes, cautioned as long ago as 1941: "to apply any theory we have to suppose that the data are homogeneous, i.e. that no systematical change of climate and no important change in the basin have occurred within the observation period and that no such changes will take place in the period for which extrapolations are made." Today, with the rapid increase in greenhouse gases and its consequences on the climate system, including the possibility of increases in the frequency and intensity of extremes, the assumptions spelled out by Gumbel are no longer necessarily tenable. An open question is how best to convey the risk of extreme events under a changing (or "non-stationary") climate. A further, related challenge concerns the quantification of the risk of the simultaneous occurrence of two or more extreme events (e.g., both extreme wave height and sea level in the case of coastal flooding), sometimes termed "compound" events. In the engineering design community, there has been some resistance to taking climate change into account in flood plain management, as well as reluctance to reconsider the concept of a 100-year flood under non-stationarity.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7kd21jw

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

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South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2017-11-20T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact