Extreme hydrological events, such as floods and low flows, vary spatially and temporally in nature and are also influenced by climate change and human activities. The increase in the number of events in the last few decades has motivated research of studying their change of occurrence, trend, and other characteristics.
Changing the frequency of extreme events is one of the cornerstones in infrastructure projects’ planning, designing and management. Infrastructure design projects based on the assumption of stationarity may not provide the water levels assumed for flood protection, water supply or hydropower generation over the design life since the nonstationarity would cause uncertainty and changes in the return period of a designed streamflow event.
With the advance and availability of a range of global data products, including The Global Runoff Data for the southern Africa region and observation data (https://www.bafg.de/GRDC/EN/Home/homepage_node.html), this study aims to apply different techniques to study the changing characteristics of hydrological extremes in world largest river basins. This includes analysis of changes and trends, variability, time of occurrence, as well as attribution analysis.
The proposed Master thesis work contributes to part of the objectives of the ongoing research project: Advancing frequency analysis of nonstationary hydrological extremes for reducing flood risk in a changing climate (https://www.mn.uio.no/geo/english/research/projects/hydrological-extremes-and-flood-risk/index.html) - Department of Geosciences (uio.no).