Managing uncertainty in flood protection planning with climate projections

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 22, 2511–2526, 2018 https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-2511-2018 © Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Managing uncertainty in flood protection planning with climate projections Beatrice Dittes, Olga Špačková, Lukas Schoppa, and Daniel Straub Engineering Risk Analysis Group, Technische Universität München, Arcisstr. 21, 80333 Munich, Germany Correspondence: Beatrice Dittes () Received: 24 September 2017 – Discussion started: 1 November 2017 Revised: 19 January 2018 – Accepted: 30 March 2018 – Published: 24 April 2018 Abstract. Technical flood protection is a necessary part of integrated strategies to protect riverine settlements from extreme floods. Many technical flood protection measures, such as dikes and protection walls, are costly to adapt after their initial construction. This poses a challenge to decision makers as there is large uncertainty in how the required protection level will change during the measure lifetime, which is typically many decades long. Flood protection requirements should account for multiple future uncertain factors: socioeconomic, e.g., whether the population and with it the damage potential grows or falls; technological, e.g., possible advancements in flood protection; and climatic, e.g., whether extreme discharge will become more frequent or not. This paper focuses on climatic uncertainty. Specifically, we devise methodology to account for uncertainty associated with the use of discharge projections, ultimately leading to planning implications. For planning purposes, we categorize uncertainties as either “visible”, if they can be quantified from available catchment data, or “hidden”, if they cannot be quantified from catchment data and must be estimated, e.g., from the literature. It is vital to consider the “hidden uncertainty”, since in practical applications only a limited amount of information (e.g., a finite projection ensemble) is available. We use a Bayesian approach to quantify the “visible uncertainties” and combine them with an estimate of the hidden uncertainties to learn a joint probability distribution of the parameters of extreme discharge. The methodology is integrated into an optimization framework and applied to a pre-alpine case study to give a quantitative, cost-optimal recommendation on the required amount of flood protection. The results show that hidden uncertainty ought to be considered in planning, but the larger the uncertainty already present, the smaller the impact of adding more. The recommended planning is robust to moderate changes in uncertainty as well as in trend. In contrast, planning without consideration of bias and dependencies in and between uncertainty components leads to strongly suboptimal planning recommendations. 1 Introduction The frequency of large fluvial flood events is expected to increase in Europe due to climate change (Alfieri et al., 2015). Therefore, planning authorities increasingly incorporate discharge projections into the assessment of future flood protection needs, rather than considering past observations alone. However, projections differ widely in terms of the level and trend of extreme discharge that they forecast. Future discharge extremes therefore should be modeled probabilistically for flood protection planning (Aghakouchak et al., 2013). This raises two main questions: (1) how does one quantify a relevant uncertainty spectrum and (2) how is this then further used to identify a protection strategy? Recent studies have aimed at quantifying individual uncertainties in (extreme) discharge (Bosshard et al., 2013; Hawkins and Sutton, 2011; Sunyer, 2014). Sunyer (2014) has pointed out the usefulness of finding a methodology to combine uncertainties for flood protection planning. In the first part of this paper we present such a methodology for deriving a probabilistic model of extreme discharge; it is a pragmatic approach to handling the limited available data in practical problems. We quantitatively incorporate climate uncertainty from multiple information sources as well as an estimate of the “hidden uncertainty” into learning the probability distribution of parameters of extreme discharge. The term hidden Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. 2512 B. Dittes et al.: Managing uncertainty in flood protection planning with climate projections j Flood projections k Hidden uncertainty l Account for uncertainty and bias within projections m Account for dependency among projections n Bayesian decision framework (incl. parameter uncertainty) o Protection recommendation Figure 1. Process of finding the recommended planning margin from projections and hidden uncertainty estimate. uncertainty refers to uncertainty components that cannot be quantified from the given projections and data. For example, if the same hydrological model has been used for all projections, then the hydrological model uncertainty is “hidden”, since one effectively has only a single sample of hydrological model output. It is vital to consider the hidden uncertainty since in practical applications only a limited amount of information and models is available and hidden uncertainty will always be present. Once established, the question is then how to deal with the uncertainty in flood risk estimates when conducting flood protection planning. Multiple approaches have been proposed (Hallegatte, 2009; Kwakkel et al., 2010), including the addition of a planning margin to the initial design. The planning margin is the protection capacity implemented in excess of the capacity that would be selected without taking into account the uncertainties. Such reserves are used in practice; for example, in Bavaria, a planning margin of 15 % is applied to the design of new protection measures to account for climate change (Pohl, 2013; Wiedemann and Slowacek, 2013). Planning margins are typically implemented based on rule-of-thumb estimates rather than a rigorous quantitative analysis (KLIWA, 2005, 2006; De Kok et al., 2008). We have previously proposed a fully quantitative Bayesian decision-making framework for flood protection (Dittes et al., 2018). Bayesian techniques are a natural way to model discharge probabilistically (Coles et al., 2003; Tebaldi et al., 2004). They also make it easy to combine several sources of information (Viglione et al., 2013). Furthermore, Bayesian methods support updating the discharge distribution in the future, when new information becomes available (Graf et al., 2007). Our framework probabilistically updates the distribution of extreme discharge with hypothetical observations of future discharge, which are modeled probabilistically. This is an instance of a sequential (or “preposterior”) decision analysis (Benjamin and Cornell, 1970; Davis et al., 1972; Kochendorfer, 2015; Raiffa and Schlaifer, 1961). This enables a sequential planning process, where it is taken (...truncated)