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Regional Climate, Water, Energy Resources and uncertainties from 1960 to 2030

A project funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche through its Program VMCS - Vulnerability Programme: environment, climate and societies.

A main challenge of the current century is the identification of optimal and sustainable strategies for the management of water and related resources. Hydrological scenarios required for this are classically obtained via simulation models from meteorological scenarios. Available present or future meteorological scenarios are usually not adapted to the constraints of real water systems - and especially to their space and time scales.

The first objective of the present research project is to analyse the possibility to develop a weather generator able to produce relevant weather scenarios for impact studies.

The uncertainty associated with meteorological scenarios is usually high. This especially requires the consideration of the whole range of possible scenarios rather than a few selected ones. This calls for a probabilistic framework that allows for the generation of a relevant panel of scenarios. On this other hand, this calls for the investigation of possible strategies that would allow reducing the associated uncertainty.

Reducing and accounting for uncertainties in impact assessment is the second objective of this project.

The water system sensitivity and vulnerability to climate modification for a given management configuration is difficult to quantify. This requires the definition of a pertinent set of quantitative and probabilistic criteria to judge the system behaviour under different climatic and management configurations. This also requires estimating the significance of simulated impacts.

The third objective of the project is to develop and apply such a impact analysis framework.

These analyses and developments will be done by the Laboratoire d’étude des Transferts en Hydrologie et Environnement (LTHE) in collaboration with Electricité De France (EDF), the biggest private company producing electricity of the country, for 2 French mesoscale water systems presenting striking management issues. Weather scenarios will next be generated for the present climate situation and for a 2030 climate. Climate change impacts on the water resource and variability, on related energy resources and variability will be estimated with associated uncertainty. Quantitative measures will be developed to assess these impacts and the associated sustainability of the system.

The RIWER2030 project is supported by the CAPENERGIE competitiveness cluster involving more than 400 partners from 5 regions in southern France especially.


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