Abstract
The future resilience of water supply systems is unprecedentedly challenged by non-stationary processes, such as fast population growth and a changing climate. A thorough understanding of how these non-stationarities impact water supply resilience is vital to support sustainable decision making, particularly for large cities in arid and/or semi-arid regions. In this study, a novel modeling framework, which integrates hydrological processes and water management, was established over a representative water limited metropolitan area to evaluate the impacts of water availability and water demand on reservoir storage and water supply reliability. In this framework, climate change induced drought events were selected from statistically downscaled Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 outputs under the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 scenario, while future water demand was estimated by the product of projected future population and per capita water use. Compared with the first half of the 21st century (2000–2049), reservoir storage and water supply reliability during the second half century (2050–2099) are projected to reduce by 16.1% and 14.2%, respectively. While both future multi-year droughts and population growth will lower water supply resilience, the uncertainty associated with future climate projection is larger than that associated with urbanization. To reduce the drought risks, a combination of mitigation strategies (e.g., additional conservation, integrating new water sources, and water use redistribution) was found to be the most efficient approach and can significantly improve water supply reliability by as much as 15.9%.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 22-32 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Journal of Hydrology |
| Volume | 563 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2018 |
Funding
Both GZ and HG were supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation Grant CBET-1454297 . GZ was also partially funded by the Texas Water Resources Institute (Mills Scholar Program) and the U.S. Geological Survey Graduate Research Program . SCK and BSN were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy ( DOE ) Water Power Technologies Office as a part of the SECURE Water Act Section 9505 Assessment. NV was supported by the DOE Office of Science as a part of the research in Multi-Sector Dynamics, Earth and Environmental System Modeling Program. This research has also benefitted from the use of the Texas A&M Supercomputing Facility ( http://sc.tamu.edu ). This paper was coauthored by employees of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, managed by Battelle under contract DE-AC05-76RL01830 (both contracts are with the U.S. Department of Energy). Accordingly, the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States government purposes. The data used in this study are listed in the references, tables, and supporting information .
Keywords
- Climate change
- Demand growth
- Droughts
- Non-stationarity
- Water supply resilience