Abstract
Flooding is the costliest natural hazard, globally accounting for more
than 40% (2.8 billion USD) of direct damages from 1900 to 2015. While
global flood risk is predicted to continue to increase overall, flood
risk is highly variable at local scales and dependent on both the social
and physical processes that affect the natural and built environment.
Projections of flood risk at smaller scales are crucial for efforts to
improve insurance markets, disaster preparedness, environmental justice,
and city and regional planning. Flood risk can be quantified by
integrating the dynamics of expected land use/land cover change (LULCC)
and climate variability predicted under Representative Concentration
Pathway forecasts at fine spatiotemporal resolutions. In this study, we
present a forecast analysis of watershed-scale hydrology in the Neuse
River watershed, NC from 2006 to 2100 to identify how patterns of LULCC
and climate variability will influence the return period, flood peaks
and volumes predicted from the 1% Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP)
storms. Using the EPA’s LULCC model Integrated Climate and Land Use
Scenarios (ICLUS), the CMIP5’s precipitation model of 20
regionally-downscaled Global Climate Models (GCMs), and the
physically-based, distributed hydrologic model Vflo, we predict the
hydrologic response of probabilistic storms through the end of the 21st
century.