Quantifying the Urban Water Supply Impacts of Climate Change

Jeffrey O’Hara () and Konstantine Georgakakos

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2008, vol. 22, issue 10, 1477-1497

Abstract: The difference in timing between water supply and urban water demand necessitates water storage. Existing reservoirs were designed based upon hydrologic data from a given historical period, and, given recent evidence for climatic change, may be insufficient to meet demand under future climate change scenarios. The focus of this study is to present a generally applicable methodology to assess the ability of existing storage to meet urban water demand under present and projected future climatic scenarios, and to determine the effectiveness of storage capacity expansions. Uncertainties in climatic forcing and projected demand scenarios are considered explicitly by the models. The reservoir system in San Diego, California is used as a case study. We find that the climate change scenarios will be more costly to the city than scenarios using historical hydrologic parameters. The magnitude of the expected costs and the optimal investment policy are sensitive to projected population growth and the accuracy to which our model can predict spills. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Keywords: Climate change adaptation; Reservoir storage expansion; Urban water reliability; Land surface hydrology; Water planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11269-008-9238-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:waterr:v:22:y:2008:i:10:p:1477-1497

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-008-9238-8

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().