Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Integrated regional risk assessment and safety management: Challenge from Agenda 21
- 3 Risk analysis: The unbearable cleverness of bluffing
- 4 Aspects of uncertainty, reliability, and risk in flood forecasting systems incorporating weather radar
- 5 Probabilistic hydrometeorological forecasting
- 6 Flood risk management: Risk cartography for objective negotiations
- 7 Responses to the variability and increasing uncertainty of climate in Australia
- 8 Developing an indicator of a community's disaster risk awareness
- 9 Determination of capture zones of wells by Monte Carlo simulation
- 10 Controlling three levels of uncertainties for ecological risk models
- 11 Stochastic precipitation-runoff modeling for water yield from a semi-arid forested watershed
- 12 Regional assessment of the impact of climate change on the yield of water supply systems
- 13 Hydrological risk under nonstationary conditions changing hydroclimatological input
- 14 Fuzzy compromise approach to water resources systems planning under uncertainty
- 15 System and component uncertainties in water resources
- 16 Managing water quality under uncertainty: Application of a new stochastic branch and bound method
- 17 Uncertainty in risk analysis of water resources systems under climate change
- 18 Risk and reliability in water resources management: Theory and practice
- 19 Quantifying system sustainability using multiple risk criteria
- 20 Irreversibility and sustainability in water resources systems
- 21 Future of reservoirs and their management criteria
- 22 Performance criteria for multiunit reservoir operation and water allocation problems
- 23 Risk management for hydraulic systems under hydrological loads
7 - Responses to the variability and increasing uncertainty of climate in Australia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Integrated regional risk assessment and safety management: Challenge from Agenda 21
- 3 Risk analysis: The unbearable cleverness of bluffing
- 4 Aspects of uncertainty, reliability, and risk in flood forecasting systems incorporating weather radar
- 5 Probabilistic hydrometeorological forecasting
- 6 Flood risk management: Risk cartography for objective negotiations
- 7 Responses to the variability and increasing uncertainty of climate in Australia
- 8 Developing an indicator of a community's disaster risk awareness
- 9 Determination of capture zones of wells by Monte Carlo simulation
- 10 Controlling three levels of uncertainties for ecological risk models
- 11 Stochastic precipitation-runoff modeling for water yield from a semi-arid forested watershed
- 12 Regional assessment of the impact of climate change on the yield of water supply systems
- 13 Hydrological risk under nonstationary conditions changing hydroclimatological input
- 14 Fuzzy compromise approach to water resources systems planning under uncertainty
- 15 System and component uncertainties in water resources
- 16 Managing water quality under uncertainty: Application of a new stochastic branch and bound method
- 17 Uncertainty in risk analysis of water resources systems under climate change
- 18 Risk and reliability in water resources management: Theory and practice
- 19 Quantifying system sustainability using multiple risk criteria
- 20 Irreversibility and sustainability in water resources systems
- 21 Future of reservoirs and their management criteria
- 22 Performance criteria for multiunit reservoir operation and water allocation problems
- 23 Risk management for hydraulic systems under hydrological loads
Summary
ABSTRACT
This chapter describes recent developments in the methods used to cope with uncertainty in water systems in Australia. The very high historical variability of Australian rainfall and runoff means that climate change simply may amplify a preexisting problem. Variability of flows to urban, irrigation, and environmental uses is considered, as well as issues of infrastructure robustness in the face of an increasing probability of large rainfall events. In general, the thrust has been to develop practices for flow allocation and demand management that are based on relative water availability, stochastically interpreted, rather than on absolute quantities. Operating rules are being adopted that allow decentralized decision making to take place within the constraints imposed by variability. This allows individual agents to express their risk preferences, and where possible to exercise their own decisions about risk and reliability. There is a growing need for expressions of social risk preference to be built explicitly into the trade-offs that are implicit in system design and operation.
VARIABILITY IN AUSTRALIA'S CLIMATE AND HYDROLOGY
The hydrologic environments of Australia and of Southern Africa are fundamentally different from those of the Northern Hemisphere. Even within the same climatic zones, annual flow variability of these Southern Hemisphere continents is two to four times that of northwest Europe and North America (see Table 7.1). For Australia, part of the difference is that the continent lies at the western end of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system (Ropelewski and Halpert 1987) and is affected by rain depressions resulting from tropical cyclones.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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