Hydrological research innovation for the climate emergency
Conference
65th ISI World Statistics Congress 2025
Format: IPS Abstract - WSC 2025
Keywords: climate change, uncertainty quantification, water
Session: IPS 766 - Modelling and Monitoring Water Resilience and Ecosystem Services
Wednesday 8 October 2 p.m. - 3:40 p.m. (Europe/Amsterdam)
Abstract
Increasing volumes of readily available hydrological data provides rich opportunities to use data analysis techniques to explore trends in river behaviour and hazard assessment. This paper will explore the analysis of a range of historical data on river flows and climate data, and will report on two different themes of work. Firstly, a novel method to determine the respective attribution proportions of climate change and land use change to streamflow variations in river systems will be presented. The results from untangling climate change signals in high flows (floods) as well as low flow periods (droughts) are explored across Great Britain. These show an east-west split in behaviour, as well as the role urbanisation may be playing on event occurence. The second theme will explore the use of advanced uncertainty quantification methods in the forward projection of flood inundation patterns. The efficiency of emulators including Kriging and PCE methods will be presented, and a discussion of their relative strengths and weakeness when dealing with high dimensional input uncertainty.