Abstract
As the incorporation of probabilistic climate change information into UK water resource management gathers apace, understanding the relative scales of the uncertainty sources in projections of future water shortage metrics is necessary for the resultant information to be understood and used effectively. Utilising modified UKCP09 weather generator data and a multi-model approach, this paper represents a first attempt at extending an uncertainty assessment of future stream flows under forced climates to consider metrics of water shortage based on the triggering of reservoir control curves. It is found that the perturbed physics ensemble uncertainty, which describes climate model parameter error uncertainty, is the cause of a far greater proportion of both the overall flow and water shortage per year probability uncertainty than that caused by SRES emissions scenario choice in the 2080s. The methodology for producing metrics of future water shortage risk from UKCP09 weather generator information described here acts as the basis of a robustness analysis of the North Staffordshire WRZ to climate change, which provides an alternative approach for making decisions despite large uncertainties, which will follow.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Oxford Scientific Software for access to the Aquator Water Resource Model, Ron Manley for the use of Hysim, and Mott MacDonald Ltd and Severn Trent Water Ltd for releasing instrumental data and supplying modelling parameters for the North Staffordshire sub-catchments. The authors are also grateful for the helpful insights of two anonymous reviewers.
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Harris, C.N.P., Quinn, A.D. & Bridgeman, J. Quantification of uncertainty sources in a probabilistic climate change assessment of future water shortages. Climatic Change 121, 317–329 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0871-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0871-8