Exploring potential floods is both essential and critical to making informed decisions for adaptation options at a river basin scale. The present study investigates changes in flood extremes in the future using downscaled CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project—Phase 5) high-resolution ensemble projections of near-term climate for the Upper Thu Bon catchment in Vietnam. Model bias correction techniques are utilized to improve the daily rainfall simulated by the multi-model climate experiments. The corrected rainfall is then used to drive a calibrated supper-tank model for runoff simulations. The flood extremes are analyzed based on the Gumbel extreme value distribution and simulation of design hydrograph methods. Results show that the former method indicates almost no changes in the flood extremes in the future compared to the baseline climate. However, the later method explores increases (approximately 20%) in the peaks of very extreme events in the future climate, especially, the flood peak of a 50-year return period tends to exceed the flood peak of a 100-year return period of the baseline climate. Meanwhile, the peaks of shorter return period floods (e.g., 10-year) are projected with a very slight change. Model physical parameterization schemes and spatial resolution seem to cause larger uncertainties; while different model runs show less sensitivity to the future projections.
Increasing flood risks in a changing climate tend to put greater pressure on water-related infrastructure, existing operations, and management practices. This paper introduces preliminary research results on river information management and flood-risk reduction based on an early flood-release approach that has the goals of better reservoir operation, adapting to climate change, and ensuring dam safety in Vietnam. Early flood release is performed using inflow prediction information derived from a medium-range global numerical weather-prediction model. The results show that peak discharge and inundation areas are remarkably reduced, and are useful for improving the safety of dams and flood-risk management in downstream areas.
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