Hydroclimatic scenario generation using two-stage stochastic simulation framework

Abstract

Climate change poses significant challenges for decision-making processes across a range of sectors. From the water resources planning and management perspective, the interest is often in evaluating the performance of a water supply system in a future state considering the potential changes in rainfall and streamflow characteristics. With observed climate change signals, scenario-based projections of rainfall and streamflow simulations are crucial for evaluating the potential impacts of climate change on water resource systems. Given the complexity of the existing approaches, their applications for generating scenario-based projections of streamflow and rainfall are limited. We developed a non-parametric bootstrapping approach, NPScnGen, for future scenario generation of any hydroclimatic variable. The developed approach is flexible and can be used with any physical hydrological or data-driven stochastic model that provides simulations of hydroclimatic variables of interest for the historical climate condition. In NPScnGen, samples of any set of time-series characteristics, such as mean and standard deviation, are generated from a multivariate Gaussian process for the considered scenario, and then bootstrapping is performed to select the closest sample from the historical simulation of that hydroclimatic variable. We have also proposed a modified wavelet-based model, Wavelet-HMM, and used that model to synthetically generate historical climate time-series as a baseline. We present the application of the developed framework consisting of historical climate simulation and future climate projection approaches on rainfall and streamflow datasets for the Tampa Bay region in Florida.

Plain Language Summary: Water resources managers require a wide range of hypothetical but potential changes in hydroclimatic variables such as streamflow and rainfall to evaluate the sustenance of water supply systems in future. Existing scenario generation approaches are limited by either the complexity of statistical models or dependency on climate models which have their own limitations. In such a scenario, the developed non-parametric scenario generation framework in this study, NPScnGen, can be very useful. The developed framework can be applied with any sophisticated time-series generation model that can generate synthetic hydroclimatic traces for baseline climate condition, and it is also flexible in generating a wide range of potential climate change scenarios. We show the application of the framework on both streamflow and rainfall datasets.