Exploring multidecadal changes in climate and reservoir storage for assessing nonstationarity in flood peaks and...

The changing climate and reservoir storage have a far-reaching influence on the nonstationarity in flood peaks worldwide, but the quantification of the relative contribution of each covariate (i.e., climate and reservoir storage) is fundamentally challenging especially under the time-varying mechanisms in statistical properties. This study proposed an integrated flood frequency analysis for assessing the impacts of changing climate and reservoir storage on the nonstationarity in flood peaks and flood risks worldwide. The 32 major river catchments covering more than 60% of hydro-meteorological observation stations and 70% of reservoir storage worldwide constituted the case study. The proposed three-faceted approach was explored systematically through: modeling the nonstationarity in global flood peaks, identifying the contribution of changing climate and reservoir storage to the nonstationarity of flood peaks, and quantifying the change in flood risks under the nonstationary condition. The findings pointed out that global flood trends varied from increasing +19.3%/decade to decreasing -31.6%/decade. Taking the stationary flood frequency analysis as the benchmark, the comparative results revealed that the flood risk in 5 rivers under the nonstationary condition in response to warming climate significantly increased (1% → 5%) over the historical period whereas the flood risk in 7 rivers in response to increasing reservoir storage largely reduced (1% → 0.5%). Despite the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of observations, the changes in flood peaks evaluated here were explicitly in lined with the changing climate and reservoir storage, supporting the demand for considering the nonstationarity of flood peaks and risks in social infrastructure planning and designing as well as water management.