Impact of climate change on extreme rainfall and drainage design

Overview

In the study of climate change, rainfall projections on the time scale of minutes are of particular interest to Singapore’s Public Utilities Board (PUB) to support its climate change adaptation plans for drainage infrastructure. However, due to limitations in the global scale general circulation models (GCMs) and regional climate models (RCMs), rainfall projections at such high temporal resolution are not readily available.

This project will use an innovative weather regime-dependent stochastic model to fill this gap. The model will be able to be used by the National Environment Agency-Centre for Climate Research Singapore (NEA-CCRS) for high resolution regional modelling for future climate projection works.

The objectives of the project are to:

• identify the key weather regimes in Singapore
• downscale climate projections from GCM/RCM to produce future rainfall projections of sufficiently high resolution to improve the accuracy of modelling and flood mapping.