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Calibrated Methodology for Assessing Adaptation Costs for Urban Drainage Systems
Citation:
Calibrated Methodology for Assessing Adaptation Costs for Urban Drainage Systems .
Impact/Purpose:
Estimate the impacts of climate change on urban drainage infrastructure
Description:
Changes in precipitation patterns associated with climate change may pose significant challenges for storm water management systems across much of the U.S. In particular, adapting these systems to more intense rainfall events will require significant investment. The assessment of these potential costs on a national scale would provide valuable perspective for policymakers and planners as they consider adaptation investments for the infrastructure under their management. To facilitate the assessment of urban drainage adaptation costs at the national level, this paper presents a reduced-form approach for estimating changes in normalized flood depth from extreme rainfall events (the volume of node flooding normalized by the area of the catchment) and the associated costs of flood prevention. This reduced form approach is calibrated to results generated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) for city-wide or neighborhood-level catchments in seven cities across different regions of the U.S. Estimates of normalized flood depth produced by this approach represent a reasonable approximation of the magnitude of adaptation costs associated with storm water management and exhibit no systematic bias relative to results generated by SWMM.