This resource archives Model files supporting the paper "Impacts of climate change on storm event based flow regime and channel stability of urban headwater streams".
The abstract for this paper follows: "Due to the recent improved availability of global and regional climate change (CC) models and associated data, the projected impact of CC on urban stormwater management is well documented. However, most studies are based on simplified design storm analysis and unit-area runoff models but studies on evaluation of long-term, continuous hydrologic response of extensive stormwater control measures (SCM) implementation under future CC scenarios are limited. Moreover, channel stability in response to CC is seldom evaluated due to the challenge associated with developing a long term, continuous sediment transport model. The study objective was to evaluate the impact of CC on storm event based flow regime and channel stability in a small, urbanized catchment (0.9 km2) in Montgomery County, Maryland, USA. This study employed a previously developed well-calibrated, coupled hierarchical modeling approach, integrating a watershed-scale Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) with the Hydrologic Engineering Centers River Analysis System (HEC-RAS) to achieve its goal. Ensemble modeling results indicates that conclusions related to CC impacts of SCM induced flow drawn from simplified, unit area models are very much different from dynamic, continuous simulations that consider the complexities of real urban catchments and SCM interactions. Despite a general decrease in total rainfall amount for most storm events, there is a noted increase in intensity for nearly all future storm events compared to current climatic conditions. This change in storm event-based rainfall pattern is expected to drive the catchment scale hydrology to a flashier regime in future which in turn is expected to increase the extent of channel erosion compared to the current climate condition. A multicriteria design approach considering the interplay of multiple SCMs and local sediment transport capacity is thus necessary to ensure channel stability under changing climate."