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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Anna MurgatroydORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Faced with the prospect of climate change and growing demands for water, water resources managers are increasingly examining the potential for inter-basin water transfers to alleviate water shortages. However, water transfers are vulnerable to large-scale spatially coherent droughts which may lead to water shortages in neighboring river basins at the same time. Under climate change, increasingly severe droughts are also expected to have greater spatial extent. We have integrated climate, hydrological and water resource modeling to explore the resilience of new transfer schemes between two neighboring water companies in Southern England. An extended historical record of river flows and large ensemble of future flows derived from climate simulations were used to explore the effects of spatial and temporal drought variability. The analysis examines meteorological, hydrological and water resource drought events and how the spatial characteristics of these droughts may change with different transfer arrangements. Results indicate that all drought types examined are expected to increase in frequency and intensity throughout the twenty-first century, but a new transfer has the capability to increase the resilience of water supplies. The analysis also highlights the importance of testing new water infrastructure against drought events that are more extreme and have different spatial patterns to those in historical records, demonstrating the value of scenario-based approaches to adaptive water resource planning.
Author(s): Murgatroyd A, Hall JW
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Frontiers in Environmental Science
Year: 2020
Volume: 8
Online publication date: 08/12/2020
Acceptance date: 20/11/2020
Date deposited: 09/08/2024
ISSN (electronic): 2296-665X
Publisher: Frontiers Research Foundation
URL: https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2020.571647
DOI: 10.3389/fenvs.2020.571647
Data Access Statement: Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. This data can be found here: The Weather@Home sequences can be downloaded from the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis repository (https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/4eb66be638e04d759939a7af571f18ad). CEH Gridded rainfall estimates can be found in the CEH data repository (https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/documents/ee9ab43d-a4fe-4e73-afd5-cd4fc4c82556). The DECIPHeR model code is available at https://github.com/uob-hydrology/DECIPHeR and corresponding flow series at https://doi.org/10.5523/bris.2pkv9oxgfzvts235zrui7xz00g. Monthly water demand profile has been published by Dobson and Mijic (2020) and accessed via https://zenodo.org/record/3764678#.Xs0JNmhKhPY. Demand projections at company level have been published by the Environment Agency (2019b), accessed at [continues at https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-science/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2020.571647/full#h8 ]
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