Innovative flow risk assessment with climate change perspective in Yesilirmak Basin

Abstract

Surface temperature increase due to global warming results in polar ice melting, snow cover thinning, changes in precipitation anomaly. All these phenological effects alert engineers, planners and administrators to be more sensitive against climate change-based risk effects on water structures. Vulnerability to natural disasters such as floods and droughts are expected to occur more frequent than past. Therefore, design and potential evaluation of water structures such as transmission channels, water wells, dams and hydraulic power generation facilities need to be re-evaluation. This re-evaluations procedure must be updated by taking into consideration climate change impacts with their risk assessments. For this purpose, the climate change-based risk levels are calculated from historically available records through possible trend tendencies, which are expressed in terms of trend slope. It has been observed that, in general, the climate change impacts are not significant on precipitation and runoff This is due to the low trend slopes in the standardized hydro-meteorological time series. This point has been documented for Yesilirmak basin, where the climate change impact is very limited.