Last Week

Next Week

No events added yet.
View all events.

Events Off Campus

Optimization for economically and ecologically robust floodplain planning.
August 19, 2015
Join Caitlin Spense '11 - Graduate Research Assistant in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UMass for her talk. Climate nonstationarity and uncertainty raise important issues related to design and planning within the water sector. In addition, the water sector has acknowledged the need for improved methods of incorporating impacts of water resources development on ecosystems into project evaluation. We present a decision analytic approach to selecting flood management portfolios that maximize robustness to climate change of both economic and ecological objectives. Robustness is measured according to the breadth of possible change in climate variables that can occur while maintaining acceptable economic and ecological performance of the flood management system and floodplain. A satisficing criterion is used to assess system performance, in which thresholds in quantifiable economic and ecological performance metrics delineate acceptable performance. The model is applied to choose combinations of infrastructural and non-structural, options-based flood management interventions on the Iowa River. Results demonstrate the trade-offs between the high level of flood protection afforded through levee construction and low-regret reservoir re-operation which would expedite reservoir flood preparation and restore mid-magnitude flows downstream of a flood control dam.
UMass - FH 241
3:00 pm

No events added yet.
View all events.