Weathershift Water Tools: Risk-Based Resiliency Planning For Drainage Infrastructure Design And Rainfall Harvesting

Infrastructure and buildings constructed today will experience significantly different weather patterns over the course of their lifetime due to the impacts of climate change. In order for utility agencies and property developers to plan for these changes, localized data on the projected changes in rainfall patterns is needed. For stormwater management, this data would include changes in rainfall intensity, duration, and frequency, along with correlating updates to existing hydrologic design standards. The WeatherShift flooding tool uses data from 21 global climate models to generate projected rainfall statistics for a range of emission scenarios and future time frames. This data is presented in the form of localized climate change-shifted rainfall Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves for use in drainage infrastructure design, such as for sizing storm drain networks, pump stations, and treatment plants.In this paper we discuss how we use data from global climate models and an Argos Analytics-developed tool to construct distributions of future rainfall intensity as a function of rainfall duration and return time, which can then be applied in engineering practice for risk-based resiliency planning of drainage infrastructure. Optimizing infrastructure capacity design enables planning for risk-based adaptations while minimizing lifecycle costs. We also discuss a proposed tool for morphing daily rainfall time series to reflect future climate conditions, which can be used by the TopUp (TM) rainfall harvesting tool to predict future rainfall harvesting scenarios.