Climate Change and Water Resources

Course description

Content

1. Basic statistical concepts. Statistical analysis of historical climatic and hydrologic variables on seasonal and annual basis. Homogeneity test, trend test, analysis of extreme events including floods and draughts.

2. Hydrological processes at catchment scale. Introduction to rainfall-runoff processes and hydrological modeling. Simulation of the hydrological cycle at catchment scale using a simple conceptual hydrological model. Model calibration and validation principles. Trial-and-error and autocalibration techniques.

3. Climate modeling principles for global and regional scales and links to hydrology. IPCC scenarios and projections of climate change. Retrieval of climate projection scenarios of daily values of precipitation and other meteorological variables. Introduction to downscaling and bias correction methods of climate model results. Bias correction of climate projection scenarios using different bias correction methods.

4. Projection of future hydrological conditions as affected by climate change. Analysis of water balance, seasonal and annual statistics, and extreme events.

5. Analysis of uncertainty factors related to climate modeling, bias correction method, and hydrological modeling.

Recommended academic qualifications

If you have completed the Forestry and Landscape Engineering programme, you are qualified for this course.

BSc in Natural Resources, Food Science, Landscape Architecture, Biology-Biotechnology, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography and Geoinformatics and Geology-Geoscience from University of Copenhagen or equivalent is recommended.