Evaluation of Climate Change Impact on Future Bioclimatic Condition and Water Demand

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Abstract

The recent investigations have demonstrated that increase of global average surface air has been subjected to high emission of greenhouse gases which is the main cause of climate change. Climate change impacts temperature, precipitation and the state of available water resources which will affect the humane health and life style. A major factor which is altered by climate change is the total water demand where the domestic water demand has higher priority. The temporal variation of domestic water demand is impacted by climate change at short periods such as a day or long periods such as a year. The bioclimatic condition is a key factor in domestic water demand variations due to its effect on the physiological condition of human body. Therefore projection of bioclimatic condition is an important factor in water demand projection and planning for water resources development. For assessment of climate change impacts, the simulated climatic variables by GCMs under different climate change scenarios are used. However, The GCMs outputs are relatively coarse for the application on regional and local scales; therefore the downscaling procedure is used to bring down the results of GCMs at the desired regional scale. In this study, future projections of daily regional climatic data are generated using statistical downscaling of HADCM3 GCM outputs by LARS-WG model for New York City. To measure the bioclimatic condition, indices of equivalent temperature, approximated physiological strain and approximated heat stress are used. The regression model is used to explore the relationship between the bioclimatic indices and the water demand. The results of the study show the significant impact of climate change on the bioclimatic conditions which lead to changes in the amount of water consumption in future decades.

Rights

© ASCE, 2012

APA Citation

Karamouz, M., Nazif, S., Goharian, E., & Barrow, L. (2012). Evaluation of Climate Change Impact on Future Bioclimatic Condition and Water Demand. In World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2012 (pp. 3397–3408). https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784412312.343

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