Volume 22 (Firas Hameed Al Janabi 2015)
Firas Hameed Al Janabi, 2014
Impact of Climate Change on
the Storm Water System in
Al Hillah City / IRAQ
ISBN 978-3-86780-417-2
Abstract
The impact of climate change is increasingly important to the design of urban water infrastructure like stormwater systems, sewage systems and drinking water systems. Growing evidence indicates that the water sector will not only be affected by climate change, but it will reflect and deliver many of its impacts through floods, droughts, or extreme rainfall events. Water resources will change in both quantity and quality, and the infrastructure of stormwater and wastewater facilities may face greater risk of damage caused by storms, floods and droughts. The effect of the climate change will put more difficulties on operations to disrupted services and increased cost of the water and wastewater services. Governments, urban planners, and water managers should
therefore re-examine development processes for municipal water and wastewater services and are adapt strategies to incorporate climate change into infrastructure design, capital investment projects, service provision planning, and operation and maintenance. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global mean temperature has increased by 0,7 °C during the last 100 years and, as a consequence, the hydrological cycle has intensified with, for example, more acute rainfall events. As urban drainage systems have been developed over a long period of time and design criteria are based upon climatic characteristics, these changes will affect the systems and the city accordingly. The overall objective of this thesis is to increase the knowledge about the climate change impacts on the stormwater system in Al Hillah city/Iraq. In more detail, the objective is to investigate how climate change could affect urban drainage systems specifically stormwater infrastructure, and also to suggest an adaptation plan for these changes using adaptation plans examples from international case studies.
Three stochastic weather generators have been investigated in order to understand the climate and climate change in Al Hillah. The stochastic weather generators have been used in different kind of researches and studies; for example in hydrology, floods management, urban water design and analysis, and environmental protection. To make such studies efficient, it is important to have long data records (typically daily data) so the weather generator can generate synthetic daily weather data based on a sound statistical background. Some weather generators can produce the climate change scenarios for different kind of global climate models. They can be used also to produce synthetic data for a site that does not have enough data by using interpolation methods.
To ensure that the weather generator is fitting the climate of the region properly, it should be tested against observed data, whether the synthetic data are sufficiently similar. At the same time, the accuracy of the weather generator is different from region to region and depends on the respective climate properties. Testing three weather generators GEM6, ClimGen and LARS-WG at eight climate stations in the region of Babylon overnorate/Iraq, where Al Hillah is located, is one of the purposes of the first part of this study. LARS-WG uses a semi-parametric distribution (developed distribution), whereas GEM6 and ClimGen use a parametric distribution (less complicated distribution). Different statistical tests have been selected to compare observed and synthetic weather data for the same kind, for instance, the precipitation and temperature distribution (wet and dry season). The result shows that LARS-WG represents the observed data for Babylon region in a better way than ClimGen, whereas GEM6 seems to misfit the observed data. The synthetic data will be used for a first simulation of urban run-off during the wet season and the consequences of climate change for the design and re-design of the urban drainage system in Al Hillah.
The stochastic weather generator LARS is then used to generate ensembles of future weather data using five Global Climate Models (GCMs) that best captured the full range of uncertainty. These Global Climate Models are used to construct future climate scenarios of temperature and precipitation over the region of Babylon Governorate in Iraq. The results show an increase in monthly temperatures and a decrease in the total amount of rain, yet the extreme rain events will be more intense in a shorter time.
Changes in the amount, timing, and intensity of rain events can affect the amount of stormwater runoff that needs to be controlled. The climate change calculated projections may make existing stormwater-related flooding worse. Different districts in Al Hillah city may face more frequent stormwater floods than before due to the climate change projections. All the results that have been taken from the Global Climate Models are in a daily resolution format and in order to run the Storm Water Management Model it is important to have all data in a minimum of one hour resolution. In order to fulfill this condition a disaggregation model has been used. Some hourly precipitation data were required to calibrate the temporal disaggregation model; however none of the climate stations and rain gauges in the area of interest have hourly resolution data, so the hourly data from Baghdad airport station have been used for that calibration.
The changes in the flood return periods have been seen in the projected climate change results, and a return period will only remain valid over time if environmental conditions do not change. This means that return periods used for planning purposes may need to be updated more often than previously, because values calculated based on the past 30 years of data may become unrepresentative within a relatively short time span. While return periods provide useful guidance for planning the effects of flooding and related impacts, they need to be used with care, and allowances have to be made for extremes that may occur more often than may be expected. In the study area with separated stormwater systems, the Storm Water Management Model simulation shows that the number of surface floods as well as of the floods increases in the future time periods 2050s and 2080s. Future precipitation will also increase both the flooding frequency
and the duration of floods; therefore the need to handle future situations in urban drainage systems and to have a well-planned strategy to cope with future conditions is evident. The overall impacts on urban drainage systems due to the increase of intensive precipitation events need to be adapted. For that reason, recommendations for climate change adaptation in the city of Al Hillah have been suggested. This has been accomplished by merging information from the review of five study cases, selected based on the amount and quality of information available. The cities reviewed are Seattle (USA), Odense (Denmark), Tehran (Iran), and Khulna (Bangladesh).