Speaker
Richard Hoffpauir
Civil Engineer in Water Resources
Hoffpauir Consulting, PLLC
In response to extreme drought conditions and low reservoir storage levels, the City of Austin convened a Water Resource Planning Task Force in 2014 to analyze the city's water needs and make recommendations concerning how to augment the city's future water supply. A key recommendation of the Task Force was the development of an Integrated Water Resource Plan (IWRP). Austin's 100-year IWRP, also called Water Forward, has a goal of ensuring a diversified, sustainable, and resilient water future in the face of potential drought and climate uncertainties.
Hydrologic modeling for the IWRP consisted of simulating Austin's future demands for river and reservoir supplies against the historical hydrologic record (stationary climate assumption), the historical hydrologic record with adjustments reflecting possible future climate conditions (climate trend assumption), and for droughts worse than the worst drought in the historical record. Hydrologic conditions reflecting possible future climate conditions were developed by downscaling high-resolution climate projections of temperature and precipitation simulated by global climate models and synthesizing streamflows using statistical regression models of streamflow based on local climate metrics. Droughts worse than the worst drought in the historical record were developed by extending the historical record with stochastic resampling and estimating drought return periods in the extended record based on the join probabilities of drought severity and duration.
Sponsored by AWRA's Future Risk Technical Committee.