Assessing the potential impact of future precipitation trends on urban drainage systems under multiple climate change scenarios

Investigations of climate change impacts on urban drainage system have been discerned worldwide in the past decades and will attract more attention in the coming future. This paper presents an approach to assessing the possibility of extreme rainfall events under variation greenhouse gas emission scenarios as well as a case study in Hefei City, China. Future precipitation projections were downscaled in a spatiotemporal way firstly, and summarised into intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves. The changes of the IDF were then compared subsequently between the present condition and the future scenarios. The results indicate that the local rainfall regime will generally stay the same or slightly increase for the drizzles, but the extreme events will become more intensive and frequent. Although uncertainty has been found among the different emission scenarios and the various future periods, it is still notable to take climate change into consideration to deal urban drainage system issues.