- Title
- On the relationship between site specific Australian flood risk and natural variability in the Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans
- Creator
- Kiem, Anthony S.; Verdon-Kidd D. C.
- Relation
- 34th Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium. Proceedings of the 34th Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium (Sydney 19-22 November, 2012) p. 354-361
- Publisher
- Engineers Australia
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- Recent flooding over the last three years in various parts of eastern Australia, following more than a decade with very little flooding, has emphasized previous work that highlighted the fact that the risk of flooding in Australia is not the same from one time period (e.g. season, year, or decade) to the next and that traditional assumptions of hydroclimatic stationarity are invalid. Despite the development of rigorous frameworks to assess the uncertainty of risk estimates, these techniques still do not acknowledge or account for the existence of distinct periods of elevated or reduced risk. Climatological insights into the mechanisms that drive climate variability also point to the invalidity of purely empirical approaches to risk estimation. Indeed, numerous previous studies have shown that strong relationships exist between the eastern Australian hydroclimate and global-scale ocean-atmospheric circulation processes such as the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Inter-decadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and Southern Annular Mode (SAM). Compounding this is the potential for non-stationarity in flood risk due to projected impacts of anthropogenic climate change. That is, under projected global warming the resulting changes to ocean-atmospheric circulation patterns are likely to lead to shifts in the location, magnitude and frequency of extreme precipitation events and the flooding associated with them. Therefore it is clear that, whether the cause be natural or anthropogenic, or a combination of the two, "stationarity is dead" and that work is urgently required to (a) re-evaluate current (or baseline) flood risk estimates to take into account the influences of natural climate variability, (b) develop estimations of future flood risk that take into account both the role of natural climate variability and the projected impacts of anthropogenic climate change, and (c) develop positive adaptation strategies and policy frameworks based on these reevaluated (and more realistic) flood risk estimates. This study concentrates on the first task (reevaluation of baseline flood risk estimates) by quantifying inter-annual to multi-decadal variability of flood risk at individual sites around Australia (as opposed to the New South Wales average risk estimate that was obtained previously).
- Subject
- global temperature changes; climatic changes; flood control
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1327482
- Identifier
- uon:25676
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781922107626
- Language
- eng
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