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How Can Conventional Drinking Water Treatment Facilities Build Resilience to Climate and Weather Induced Water Supply Variability?
Citation:
Levine, A. How Can Conventional Drinking Water Treatment Facilities Build Resilience to Climate and Weather Induced Water Supply Variability? In Proceedings, International Perspective on Water Resources & the Environment, Quito, ECUADOR, January 08 - 10, 2014. Environmental & Water Resources Institute (EWRI) of ASCE, Reston, VA, 1-2, (2014).
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the technical and scientific community on how drinking water treatment systems can adapt to climate change.
Description:
Abstract: Water supplies are vulnerable to a host of climate- and weather-related stressors such as droughts, intense storms/flooding, snowpack depletion, sea level changes, and consequences from fires, landslides, and excessive heat or cold. Surface water resources (lakes, reservoirs, rivers, and streams) are especially susceptible to weather-induced changes in water availability and quality. The risks to groundwater systems may also be significant. Typically, water treatment facilities are designed with an underlying assumption that water quality from a given source is relatively predictable based on historical data. However, increasing evidence of the lack of stationarity is raising questions about the validity of traditional design assumptions, particularly since the service life of many facilities can exceed fifty years. Climate and weather can induce or amplify changes in physical, chemical, and biological water quality, reaction rates, the extent of water-sediment-air interactions, and also impact the performance of treatment technologies. Water quality responses can be transient, such as erosion-induced increases in sediment and runoff. Longer-term impacts include changes in the frequency and intensity of algal blooms, gradual changes in the nature and concentration of dissolved organic matter, and modulation of the microbiological community structure, sources and survival of pathogens. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the predicted performance of conventional surface water treatment systems under different climate- and weather-induced scenarios to develop climate resiliency metrics. Modeling results are used to evaluate the process and operational capacity to respond to transient water quality changes and adapt to longer-term variability in water quality and availability.
