Reformulation of Design Channel Width for Small Size Basins Reflecting Climate Change Scenarios

Abstract:

It has generally been accepted that human-induced climate change has given significant impacts on hydro-meteorological variables. A number of studies have been reported how a manager is able to mitigate those impacts of increasing natural hazards induced from climate change such as droughts and floods. Though assessing and mitigating the impacts through climate change scenarios has been widely performed, real case applications to hydrologic structures have not yet been popularly made especially in small basins. The specific difficulty of the application for small basins is the requirement of lower time scale data of hydro- meteorological variables. In the current study, we presented how the design channel width of small basins for a specific region can be reformulated considering climate change scenarios. The scenarios of the hourly rainfall downscaled from daily data were employed for the application of small basins. We used the specific region in South Korea and 162 small rivers and creeks were modeled and the downscaled hourly data of the climate scenarios was tested. A general equation to estimate the average channel width according to the design floods estimated with the climate scenarios is reformulated to reflect the variation influenced by climate change.