In the design of infrastructure such as roads, railways and flood management in for instance urban environments and at airports, there is a need for statistical precipitation design values. These are traditionally presented as Intensity-Duration-Frequency curves (https://klimaservicesenter.no/ivf?locale=nb) and are based on station observations of precipitation every minute. The instruments do not operate well during winter, and thus, the IDF statistics are representative of the summer season only. For many users, heavy rainfall during winter when the ground is frozen can be problematic in terms of runoff due to low infiltration capacity, and the lack of winter design values is challenging.
In this project, we want to compute the probability of heavy rainfall on frozen ground occurring in today's and future climates in Norway.
For the current climate, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway) has measurements from instruments with heating at several locations in Norway, with a temporal resolution of one hour. These operate during the whole year and are an under-used source of information about seasonal differences in precipitation statistics. Additionally, a large network of daily observations is available. To assess changes in the probability of such events in the future, we use the output from an ensemble of climate models.
Knowledge from this master project can be used directly in the new Norwegian climate assessment report “Climate in Norway 2100” (an update of “Klima i Norge 2100”; Hanssen-Bauer et al., 2015), being part of the basis for climate adaptation in Norway. The report will be updated in 2024 and is commissioned by the Norwegian Environment Agency.
Experience with programming, for instance in R or Python, is an advantage.
