Assessment of Climate Change Impact on Floods in Two Catchments in Serbia

Abstract

Hydraulic structures are designed according to flows of a given return period. The design flows, estimated by means of statistical analysis, depend on the observations, while climate change impact is not explicitlytaken into account. As operating life of most hydraulic structures spreads over several decades, climate change impact should not be neglected. In this paper an analysis of climate change impact on flood flows is conducted for the Kolubara River at Slovac and for the Toplica River at Doljevac. The analysis is performed on the outputs of hydrologic modelling with the precipitation and temperature projections as the input. The Peaks over Threshold (POT) method is applied for frequency analysis of floods extracted from the flow projections. Characteristic quantiles are calculated for two future periods and compared to those estimated over the baseline period. The results suggest an increase in flood flows, particularly in the mid-21stcentury. Regardless of considerable uncertainty, these results can be used as indication of increase in design flows, and should be therefore taken into consideration within the hydraulic structure design.