- Title
- Droughts and pluvials in the Murray-Darling Basin over the past two and a half millennia
- Creator
- Ho, Michelle; Kiem, Anthony S.; Verdon-Kidd, D. C.
- Relation
- 36th Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium: The Art and Science of Water (HWRS2015). Proceedings of the 36th Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium (Hobart, Tas. 7-10 December, 2015) p. 1317-1324
- Publisher
- Engineers Australia
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- Realistic estimates of hydrological risk are crucial to enable adequate planning and preparation for extreme events. However, the accurate estimation of hydrological risk is hampered by relatively short instrumental records. Information derived from climate-sensitive paleoclimate proxies provide an opportunity to resolve hydroclimatic variability and improve risk estimates, but many regions, such as Australia's Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), currently lack suitable in situ proxies necessary to do this. Here, new MDB rainfall reconstructions are presented based on a novel method using remote paleoclimate rainfall proxies in the Australasian region spanning over the past two millennia. This study shows that both dry and wet epochs have persisted for longer periods than observed in the instrumental record prior to the 20th century. Further, some rainfall reconstructions exceeded the instrumental range (i.e. drier dry epochs and wetter wet spells) despite a systematic underestimation of extremes due to both proxy quality and model bias. Importantly, the results demonstrate that hydroclimatic risk assessments based on the instrumental record likely underestimate, or at least misinterpret, the frequency, magnitude and duration of wet and dry epochs.
- Subject
- hydrological risk; rainfall reconstructions; Murray-Darling Basin; droughts; estimates; pluvials
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1330855
- Identifier
- uon:26494
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781922107497
- Language
- eng
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