Future Flood Hazard Assessment for the City of Pamplona (Spain) Using an Ensemble of Climate Change Projections

Abstract

Understanding how the design hyetographs and floods will change in the future is essential for decision making in flood management plans. This study provides a methodology to quantify the expected changes in future hydraulic risks at the catchment scale in the city of Pamplona. It considers climate change projections supplied by 12 climate models, 7 return periods, 2 emission scenarios (representative concentration pathway RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5), and 3 time windows (2011–2040, 2041–2070, and 2070–2100). The Real-time Interactive Basin Simulator (RIBS) distributed hydrological model is used to simulate rainfall-runoff processes at the catchment scale. The results point to a decrease in design peak discharges for return periods smaller than 10 years and an increase for the 500- and 1000-year floods for both RCPs in the three time windows. The emission scenario RCP 8.5 usually provides the greatest increases in flood quantiles. The increase of design peak discharges is almost 10–30% higher in RCP 8.5 than in RCP 4.5. Change magnitudes for the most extreme events seem to be related to the greenhouse gas emission predictions in each RCP, as the greatest expected changes are found in 2040 for the RCP 4.5 and in 2100 for the RCP 8.5.