Engineering risk assessment on water structures under climate change effects
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Engineering risk assessment on water structures under climate change effects Zekâi Şen 1 & Abdullah M. Mohorji 2 & Mansour Almazroui 1
Received: 9 November 2015 / Accepted: 2 November 2017 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2017
Abstract The increase in the average temperature in the lower atmosphere caused by climate change triggers changes in various elements of the hydrological cycle at different scales depending on location in the world. Although numerous published studies are concerned with the effect of climate change on hydrological elements such as temperature, precipitation, evaporation, wind, and runoff, unfortunately, the performance of water engineering structures is not taken into consideration. Nevertheless, as an integral part of the whole water resources systems, engineering structures such as dams, canals, culverts, and wells are also subject to climate change impacts. This examines the performance of engineering structures by taking into account how climate change impacts on the risk assessment formulation. For this purpose, the risk concept is redefined and the climate change impact is taken into account by a factor dependent on the positive or negative slope of the trend from the historical record. The risk levels are revised for 10-year, 50-year, and 100-year return periods. The application of the proposed methodology is given for precipitation records for three different meteorological stations in the southeastern European province of Turkey and for the same number of
* Zekâi Şen [email protected] Abdullah M. Mohorji [email protected] Mansour Almazroui [email protected] 1
Center of Excellence for Climate Change Research / Department of Meteorology, King Abdulaziz University, PO Box 80234, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
2
Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
stations from central east-west belt over Saudi Arabia. It is observed that including the climate change factor in the risk calculation formulation generally leads to an increase in the return period and in the risk compared to conventional calculations. Therefore, it is recommended that rather than using the standard risk formulation, the simple, effective climate change risk approach, as suggested in this paper, be applied to future water engineering structure designs. Keywords Climate change . Engineering structures . Global warming . Risk . Slope . Trend
Introduction In general, climate models predict the spatial and temporal increases or decreases of rainfall in different parts of the world. Although climate change has a direct effect on the hydrological cycle, precipitation is the main supply of water resources (surface and groundwater), and accordingly, existing water engineering structures must be managed and new ones planned taking into account the effects of climate change. As the climate of a region warms, the level of snowfall decreases, and in turn, natural water storage is reduced with the decrease in snow cover, especially at high elevations
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