Infrastructure is exposed to, and potentially vulnerable to, the effects and extremes of climate and weather, including heat waves, high winds, storm surges, droughts, floods, fires and accumulations of ice and snow. Engineering practices and standards have been developed to provide acceptably low risks of failures regarding functionality, durability and safety over the service lives of infrastructure systems, which can be 50 to 100 years. In today’s world, engineers need to plan and design infrastructure for the climate and weather extremes of the future. But they face daunting challenges in trying to quantify these future extremes. Engineering design and planning is generally conducted at the regional and local scales, but global climate projections typically have coarse spatial resolutions and are most reliable at longer time scales.
Engineering standards often depend on estimates of probabilities to provide specified levels of safety. For example, a hydraulic structure might be designed to withstand a flood with an exceedance probability of 10 to 20% on a local road or 2% on a major highway. These probability estimates have traditionally been made using the observed record, but future climate may be quite different. There is no accepted method to estimate the probability of future extremes in the face of climate change. In addition, there are multiple sources of uncertainty in the projection of future climate extremes, some of which may not be quantifiable. Nonstationarity, and in articular multi-year and decadal variability further compound the challenge.
(Source:American Meteorological Society)
Engineering standards often depend on estimates of probabilities to provide specified levels of safety. For example, a hydraulic structure might be designed to withstand a flood with an exceedance probability of 10 to 20% on a local road or 2% on a major highway. These probability estimates have traditionally been made using the observed record, but future climate may be quite different. There is no accepted method to estimate the probability of future extremes in the face of climate change. In addition, there are multiple sources of uncertainty in the projection of future climate extremes, some of which may not be quantifiable. Nonstationarity, and in articular multi-year and decadal variability further compound the challenge.
(Source:American Meteorological Society)
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