Synthetic Drought Scenario Generation to Support Bottom-Up Water Supply Vulnerability Assessments

Abstract

Exploratory simulation allows analysts to discover scenarios in which existing or planned water supplies may fail to meet stakeholder objectives. These robustness assessments rely heavily on the choice of plausible future scenarios, which, in the case of drought management, requires sampling or generating a streamflow ensemble that extends beyond the historical record. This study develops a method to modify synthetic streamflow generators by increasing the frequency and severity of droughts for the purpose of exploratory modeling. To support management decisions, these synthetic droughts can be related to recent observed droughts of consequence for regional stakeholders. The method approximately preserves the spatial and temporal correlation of historical streamflow in drought-adjusted scenarios. The approach is demonstrated in a bottom-up planning context using an urban water portfolio design problem in North Carolina, a region whose water supply faces both climate and population pressures. Synthetic scenarios are used to simulate the implications for reliability and cost if events with similar severity to the recent 2007–2008 drought become more frequent under climate change, and in general, the system-level consequences of increasingly frequent and/or severe droughts. Finally, synthetically generated drought extremes are compared with runoff projections derived from downscaled climate model output, serving to support bottom-up robustness methods in water systems planning.