Abstract
Extreme weather events are projected to be more frequent and severe across the globe because of global warming. This poses challenging problems for critical infrastructures, which could be dramatically affected (or disrupted), and may require adaptation plans to the changing climate conditions. The INTACT FP7-European project evaluated the resilience and vulnerability of critical infrastructures to extreme weather events in a climate change scenario. To identify changes in the hazard induced by climate change, appropriate extreme weather indicators (EWIs), as proxies of the main atmospheric features triggering events with high impact on the infrastructures, were defined for a number of case studies and different approaches were analyzed to obtain local climate projections. We considered the influence of weighting and bias correction schemes on the delta approach followed to obtain the resulting projections, considering data from the Euro-CORDEX ensemble of regional future climate scenarios over Europe. The aim is to provide practitioners, decision-makers, and administrators with appropriate methods to obtain actionable and plausible results on local/regional future climate scenarios. Our results show a small sensitivity to the weighting approach and a large sensitivity to bias correcting the future projections.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been carried out within the activities of INTACT project, receiving funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° FP7-SEC-2013-1-606799. The information and views set out in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Union.
We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Regional Climate, and the Working Group on Coupled Modeling, former coordinating body of CORDEX and responsible panel for CMIP5.
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Reder, A., Iturbide, M., Herrera, S. et al. Assessing variations of extreme indices inducing weather-hazards on critical infrastructures over Europe—the INTACT framework. Climatic Change 148, 123–138 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2184-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2184-4