da Silva, C.V.F.; Schardong, A.; Garcia, J.I.B.; Oliveira, C.P.M. Climate Change Impacts and Flood Control Measures for Highly Developed Urban Watersheds. Water2018, 10, 829.
da Silva, C.V.F.; Schardong, A.; Garcia, J.I.B.; Oliveira, C.P.M. Climate Change Impacts and Flood Control Measures for Highly Developed Urban Watersheds. Water 2018, 10, 829.
da Silva, C.V.F.; Schardong, A.; Garcia, J.I.B.; Oliveira, C.P.M. Climate Change Impacts and Flood Control Measures for Highly Developed Urban Watersheds. Water2018, 10, 829.
da Silva, C.V.F.; Schardong, A.; Garcia, J.I.B.; Oliveira, C.P.M. Climate Change Impacts and Flood Control Measures for Highly Developed Urban Watersheds. Water 2018, 10, 829.
Abstract
Flooding and overflows are recurring problems in several Brazilian cities, which usually undergo disorderly development. Their causes vary from increased impervious surface areas, deficiency/inefficiency of drainage structures and their maintenance, siltation of rivers, channel obstructions, and climatic factors. This situation is aggravated in the major cities. The Anhangabau watershed lies in the central portion of the city of Sao Paulo – Brazil and covers a drainage area of 5.4 km². The region is highly urbanized and crossed by a major north-south road connection. During heavy rain events, portions of this interconnection passage become compromised, disrupting the flow of vehicles, creating a chaotic situation for the population, as well as losses to the national economy. Observed rainfall records and an existing IDF (intensity duration frequency) curve for the region are used to obtain design storms. To account for climate change, a well know procedure, the equidistance quantile matching method for updating IDF curves under climate change, was applied to the existing historical data. Several different global climate models (GCM) and one regional model were applied to obtain and update rainfall design storm. The GCMs and future scenarios used were from the IPCC Assessment Report 5 (AR5) and two future projections: RCP (representative concentration pathway) 4.5 and 8.5. Alternatives previously proposed to solve to flooding issue are briefly reviewed. On one of the latest studies [1], a few modern concepts of water resources management are presented, and the linear retention measure was found to offer higher potential to mitigate the flooding problem in the lower valley of the watershed. Therefore, this alternative was used to evaluate different design storms scenarios combined with return periods of 25 and 100-years as well as the updated IDF under climate change for RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5. To model the complex network, representing both road and drainage systems and their interconnections, PCSWMM/SWMM software was applied. Results are presented as flooding maps and show the impacts of the proposed linear retention measure based on the existing IDF curves and the updated IDF curves under climate change for two different drainage system conditions, current and improved with the use of linear retention reservoirs. Results show that the prosed changes on the drainage system help reduce the risk and damage to flooding. The climate change scenarios, however, impose a significant threat and need immediate attention from city planners and stakeholders.
Keywords
urban flood; hydrologic and hydraulic modeling; retention structures
Subject
Engineering, Civil Engineering
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
