Adaptive Management of Water Supply Infrastructure for Persistent Anomalies versus Climate Trends

This project addresses climate challenges faced by critical infrastructure sectors by establishing a new adaptive management approach to water supply infrastructure planning that incorporate the impacts of multi-year climate oscillations on water availability. Large scale infrastructure investments in the water sector will be needed to maintain reliable water supply globally in a changing climate.

To enable resilience at lower cost, adaptive management approaches have been developed to monitor gradual changes in precipitation patterns to guide adaptations. However, existing adaptive management approaches are confounded by the presence of multi-year climate oscillations, which make it difficult to infer long-term trends from near-term observations.

This grant supports research that seeks to address this gap by integrating climate science on multi-year oscillations with decision-support modeling for water resources management. The outcome of this research is expected to help water planners identify low-cost, adaptive approaches to maintain water supply reliability. The research team will partner with water planners to make sure the research is useful for decision-making.

Additionally, the grant will support new interactive educational materials in water resources management.

This project designs new adaptive management strategies for water supply planning that can address uncertainty in climate trends, multi-year large-scale climate oscillations, and annual variability. It will develop an approach for decomposing precipitation uncertainty into these three timescales and quantifying future opportunities to reduce uncertainty in each timescale.

This uncertainty characterization will be integrated into stochastic dynamic optimization models of water resource systems. This approach will be used to assess the potential for different combinations of adaptive strategies including flexibility in the timing, sizing, modularity, and operations of water supply infrastructure to address the different timescales of uncertainty in future precipitation.

By applying this approach to river basins in sub-Saharan Africa with contrasting patterns of precipitation variability, the project will build theory on how different temporal patterns of precipitation variability affect adaptive approaches to water infrastructure planning, design, and operations. This new knowledge can help water planners target water supply infrastructure investment to support low-cost water supply reliability.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.