- Title
- Extremes in rainfall and runoff in the Monsoonal North West of Australia derived from paleoclimate archives
- Creator
- Verdon-Kidd D. C.; Hancock, Gregory R.; Lowry, John B. C.
- Relation
- 37th Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium 2016. 37th Hydrology & Water Resources Symposium 2016: Water, Infrastructure and the Environment ( 28 November - 2 December, 2016) p. 572-579
- Publisher
- Engineers Australia
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- The Monsoonal North West (MNW) comprises natural resource management (NRM) regions in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. This region experiences a pronounced wet and dry season with moderate to strong year-to-year rainfall variability relative to other parts of Australia. A range of climate change impacts and adaptation challenges have been identified for this region, however future changes to rainfall regimes remain unclear due to the inability of Global Climate Models to capture the weather/climate processes that are known to be important. Therefore, this paper investigates an alternative method utilising paleoclimate records to produce a plausible long-term rainfall record for Oenpelli located in the north of the MNW. In the absence of local paleoclimate archives at a suitable temporal resolution, various remote paleoclimate records are identified that resolve 25% of the annual variability observed in the instrumental record. Importantly when the model is applied over the last 500 years, events that are more extreme than observed in the historical record are simulated (both wet and dry). For example, the maximum number of consecutive years of below average rainfall (19 years) is almost twice as long as observed in the instrumental record. Similarly, the maximum consecutive number of years of above average rainfall is 11, compared to eight years in the instrumental record. Implications for flood and drought risk are studied via a simple GR1A annual rainfall/runoff model demonstrating that both wet and dry spells are substantially underestimated based on the instrumental record. The findings of this study have relevance to water management and supply, cropping, tourism mining and mine site rehabilitation in the MNW.
- Subject
- natural resources; climate change; rainfall; water supply
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1343888
- Identifier
- uon:29267
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781922107954
- Language
- eng
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