Climate Change and Infrastructure Design
Developing Future-ready Climate Change Design Thresholds, Coping Ranges and Success Criteria for Physical Assets and Infrastructure
Considering climate change can make a huge difference in infrastructure design. When building bridges, engineers have long considered how fast a river might flow or how strong the wind might blow. When designing roads and airport runways, they consider how hot temperatures might be or how high flood waters might rise. When designing dams and reservoirs, engineers consider precipitation patterns and the intensity and frequency of floods and droughts. Commercial and residential buildings and the electric grid also require engineers to consider the forces of climate they need to withstand. Until recently, engineers could confidently use data on past weather to predict future climate (known as stationarity). But this is no longer true. Increasingly, engineers must consider the effects of climate change, non-stationarity, and uncertainty in future climate. Design thresholds which are built into project designs may be breached more frequently in a future changing climate. A changing climate may result in threshold failures once considered exceptional but acceptable, becoming unexceptional (i.e., normal) and unacceptable. Projects may have to function within tighter margins between “normal” operation and critical thresholds. This may manifest itself in decreased efficiency of equipment and provide less margin for error before drastic management measures such as reduced operation, throughput etc. need to be addressed.
Engineers need a new blueprint to prepare for a future that is hard to predict. But where can engineers get actionable design-relevant information about future climate? And how should they incorporate this information into their designs considering uncertainties in climate projections? Related, it is likely that not all the climate statistics of relevance to the design, planning and operations of assets and infrastructure will be available from climate model outputs. The outputs are typically provided as long-term averages. However, decisions on asset integrity and safety may be based on short-term statistics or extreme values, such as the maximum expected 10-minute wind speed, or the 1-in-10-year rainfall event. Should engineers try to choose and use what they regard as the best projection? Or should they use all the projections to build infrastructure that is prepared for anything that may come, even though it may prove more costly? The best way to answer such questions is for engineers to work closely with climate scientists to understand what types of climate information proves most useful in what situations.
CLIMALOGIK is engaged in “co-production” of design-relevant climate information as one key part of effective systems of decision support for existing and new infrastructure. For instance, engineers can identify climate-related thresholds for each project and evaluate whether existing climate trends are threatening to exceed them on an unacceptably frequent basis. Climate models then can be used to make sensible assumptions or estimates of upper and lower bounds for the future.
Our areas of expertise include:
- High-resolution Modelling of Weather and Future Climate Extremes
- Bayesian Model Averaging and Uncertainty Analysis of Climate Projections
- Statistical Extrapolation of Historical Weather and Climate Variables
- Non-Stationary Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) Curves
- Estimation of Design Storms and Flows under Climate Change Conditions.
- Estimation of Probable Maximum Precipitation
- Computation of Probable Maximum Flood
- Climate Impacts Modelling, Vulnerability, and Risk Assessments
- Calculation of Design-relevant Climate Values
- Development of Codes and Guidelines for Integrating Risks of Climate Change into Design