Sustainable and climate sensitive hydrologic design and management of hydrosystems

Understanding the impacts of climate change on hydrologic design and management of hydrosystems is one of the important challenges faced by practicing hydrologists and water resources management professionals. Insufficient hydrologic record lengths become hindrance to explain the natural variability and effect of future climatic changes on the hydrologic design. However, many hydrologic design methods that rely on the peak discharges need to take into consideration the impact of climate change on major inputs influencing the behavior of hydrologic systems. Revisions are required for design procedures and modeling tools that help in management of hydrosystems. Examples of such revisions include use of renewed Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves in hydrologic designs and inclusion of soft-computing approaches such as fuzzy theory in mathematical programming tools. The paper discusses issues related to impacts of climate change on hydrologic design and application of soft-computing approaches for sustainable and climate sensitive management of hydrosystems. Real-life case studies are presented for assessing the applicability of soft-computing approaches wherever possible. Copyright ASCE 2005.