Climate Change Impact on Water Infrastructure: Non-Stationary Hydrology, Extreme Event Risk, and Adaptive Engineering
Climate change impacts water resources infrastructure by altering hydrologic cycles, accelerating intense precipitation events, and shifting baseline design assumptions. Civil engineering infrastructure—including urban drainage networks, hydraulic control structures, and water treatment facilities—has traditionally relied on the assumption of hydro-climatic stationarity, which assumes that natural systems fluctuate within an unchanging envelope of variability. Under non-stationary hydrological conditions, the probability distribution parameters governing extreme rainfall events change over time. The evaluation of extreme rainfall intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves utilizes non-stationary Extreme Value Type I (Gumbel) or Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distributions where location parameter ($\mu(t)$) and scale parameter ($\sigma(t)$) vary continuously as a function of time ($t$) or global mean temperature shifts: $$F(x; \mu(t), \sigma(t), \xi) = \exp \left[ -\left( 1 + \xi ...