Casey Brown

University of Massachusetts Amherst | UMass Amherst · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The report was prepared primarily in 2022 and 2023 by a team led by Casey Brown of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and in collaboration with the University of Cincinnati, Pegasys, and Industrial Economics, Incorporated. The team was funded under a partnership agreement with the Millennium Challenge Corporation, collaboratively managed by...

Water resources managers face decisions related to building new infrastructure to increase water system resilience to climate and demand changes. To inform this adaptation planning process, current decision-making methods commonly use scenario approaches to estimate the benefit of adaptation options. While effective, these new analyses require comm...

Water use in irrigated agriculture is high, so reducing non‐beneficial consumption (non‐crop evaporation) of irrigation water is a potential option to free up water for other users. Yet, in practice, proper water accounting and accompanying policies (e.g., caps on irrigation expansion) are necessary to ensure that reduced non‐beneficial consumption...

Water quality extremes, which water quality models often struggle to predict, are a grave concern to water supply facilities. Most existing water quality models use mean error functions to maximize the predictability of water quality mean value. This paper describes a composite quantile regression neural network (CQRNN) model, which simultaneously...

Intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves – sometimes also called precipitation frequency estimates – are used to design urban drainage systems for stormwater control and, when combined with hydrologic modeling, to design flood control infrastructure and other structures. However, common approaches to estimating IDF curves need to be revised to acc...

Climate change and other changes to external conditions may jeopardize the future ability of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s (SFPUC’s) Regional Water System (RWS) to meet the desired level of service. To help better understand the potential vulnerability of the RWS to uncertain future conditions, SFPUC partnered with The Water Resea...

Model emulation has become an integral tool in scenario analysis, risk assessment, and calibration of environmental models. Of particular interest is dynamic emulation – the approximation of model outputs from inputs or processes that vary in time. This paper presents a method for data-driven dynamic emulation of high-dimensional model outputs that...

Considering the reduction of steep power ramps caused by renewable energy penetration, the present study evaluates the potential of utilizing existing water supply infrastructure as small-scale pumped-hydroelectric storage (PHS) units. A novel methodology is developed that estimates the total storage capacity via the available space in five water s...

The challenge of estimating design flood magnitude under climate change has led to the development of multiple approaches to long‐term flood projection: stationarity, informed‐parameter (composed of both trend informed and climate informed), and hydrologic simulation. This is the first study to compare these approaches across a large set of hydro‐c...

Combined heat and power systems (CHP) produce heat and electricity simultaneously. Their resulting high efficiency makes them more attractive from the energy managers’ perspective than other conventional thermal systems. Although heat is a by-product of the electricity generation process, system operators usually operate CHP systems to satisfy heat...

Water allocation institutions globally must operate within legal and political contexts established by precedent and codified in operating rules, even as they flex and adjust to climate change. California’s Central Valley Water System (CVS) is a prime example. Recent global, national, regional, and local climate change assessments have highlighted...

Climate Impact Response Functions (CIRFs) could be useful for exploring potential risks of system failure under climate change. The performance of a water resource system could be synthesized through a CIRF that relates climate conditions to system behavior regarding a certain threshold of deliveries to demands or environmental flow requirements. H...

Physical and financial approaches each provide different benefits for managing environmental financial risks. Index insurance contracts, a financial approach, have been proposed for managing numerous environmental financial risks. A method for testing when and how physical (dredging) and financial risk management strategies (index insurance) could...

Variable energy sources such as solar and runoff sources are intermittent in time and space, following their driving hydro-meteorological processes. Recent research has shown that in mountainous areas the combination of solar and hydropower has large potential (termed complementarity) to cover the temporal variability of the energy load and, by thi...

Urban systems are embedded within and thereby reliant upon the complex systems of their surrounding watersheds. Building the freshwater resilience of urban systems therefore hinges on building the freshwater resilience of the larger human-hydrological systems within which they are nested. This consideration creates a system of feedbacks and tradeof...

This chapter presents the survey results from a cross section of experienced water managers using a set of carefully crafted questions. These questions covered water resources management, infrastructure resiliency, and recommendations for inclusion in education and curriculum. The chapter describes the specifics of the survey and the results obtain...

This chapter presents a compilation of work conducted by the ASCE Task Committee ‘Infrastructure Impacts of Landscape-driven Weather Change’ under the ASCE Watershed Management Technical Committee and the ASCE Hydroclimate Technical Committee. The chapter argues for explicitly considering the well-established feedbacks triggered by infrastructure s...

This chapter provides a brief overview of some of the more established approaches to resilience and risk assessment as practiced in other fields of engineering that may be pertinent to water management infrastructures. It also traces ASCE’s historical role in addressing risks to large infrastructure for water management. Finally, the chapter makes...

The New England region exhibits an increasing rate of both rooftop and major solar photovoltaic systems. Given the ambitious renewable energy goals established by the New England States, new projects for inland and offshore solar and wind farms are surging. These renewable energy penetration plans will increase the dependence of electricity supply...

Resilience is increasingly recognized as an imperative for any prospect of sustainable development, as it relates to our ability to sustain human well-being and progress under the planetary and societal changes that we face now and into the future. Yet, we are ill-prepared to meet this challenge. We neither fully understand nor manage consistently...

Incentive‐based policies, such as the cap‐and‐trade system, have been shown to be useful in the context of groundwater management. This study compares the performance of a groundwater market with water quotas when assumptions of perfect information are violated due to climate change and hydrogeologic heterogeneity and explores how changes in future...

The widespread uncertainty regarding future changes in climate, socioeconomic conditions, and demographics have increased interest in vulnerability-based frameworks for long-term planning of water resources. These frameworks shift the focus from projections of future conditions to the weaknesses of the baseline plans and then to options for reducti...

Adaptation planning and climate risk management are examples of decision processes made under climate uncertainty. A variety of approaches exist for helping an analyst to evaluate alternatives over future unknown states of the world. However, climate uncertainty requires additional considerations, including how to use available climate information,...

Conventional methods for designing infrastructure that is subject to flood risk, such as dams and levees, assume a stationary design flood. However, observed and potential non-stationarity in floods can result in costly over-design or dangerous under-design. Despite substantial attention, evidence from the literature makes clear there is no consens...

There has recently been a return in climate change risk management practice to bottom-up, robustness-based planning paradigms introduced 40 years ago. The World Bank’s decision tree framework (DTF) for “confronting climate uncertainty” is one incarnation of those paradigms. In order to better represent the state of the art in climate change risk as...

There has recently been a return in climate change risk management practice to bottom‐up, robustness‐based planning paradigms introduced 40 years ago. The World Bank's decision tree framework (DTF) for “confronting climate uncertainty” is one incarnation of those paradigms. In order to better represent the state of the art in climate change risk as...

Estimating future hydrologic floods under nonstationary climate is a key challenge for flood management. Climate-informed approaches to long-term flood projection are an appealing alternative to traditional modeling chains. This work formalizes climate-informed approaches into a general methodology consisting of four steps: (1) selection of predict...

The recent increase of devastating floods in West Africa implies an urgent need for effective flood risk management. A key element of such management is understanding how perceptions affect the implementation of mitigation measures. This paper uses the technique of framework analysis in conjunction with the conceptual framework of protection motiva...

Observed climate trends and projections of accelerated future change have motivated several studies of the impacts of climate change on water resources management in California. This paper presents a methodology that improves on previous approaches, revealing fundamental climate change risks to one of the State of California’s key water resource sy...

Climate nonstationarity and uncertainty raise important issues related to design and planning within the water sector. Participants in the planning process may not all agree on what climate assumptions and planning objectives should be included. This undermines the group’s ability to seek and agree upon a solution. This paper addresses this problem...

The transboundary Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) Basin in the southeastern United States has a long history of competition for water resources and litigation surrounding these conflicts. This case study applies the decision-scaling approach to explore the spatiotemporal impacts to water supply deficits in the ACF Basin from natural climate...

Moving towards energy systems with high variable renewable energy shares requires a good understanding of the impacts of climate change on the energy penetration. To do so, most prior impact studies have considered climate projections available from Global Circulation Models (GCMs). Other studies apply sensitivity analyses on the climate variables...

Investors, developers, policy makers and engineers are rightly concerned about the potential effects of climate change on the future performance of hydropower investments. Hydroelectricity offers potentially low greenhouse gas emission, renewable energy and reliable energy storage. However, hydroelectricity developments are large, complicated proje...

Investors, developers, policy makers and engineers are rightly concerned about the potential effects of climate change on the future performance of hydropower investments. Hydroelectricity offers potentially low greenhouse gas emission, renewable energy and reliable energy storage. However, hydroelectricity developments are large, complicated proje...

The Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrologic and river routing model simulates the water and energy fluxes that occur near the land surface and provides useful information regarding the quantity and timing of available water within a watershed system. However, despite its popularity, wider adoption is hampered by the considerable effort requ...

The conventional tools of decision-making in water resources infrastructure planning have been developed for problems with well-characterized uncertainties and are ill-suited for problems involving climate nonstationarity. In the past 20. years, a predict-then-act-based approach to the incorporation of climate nonstationarity has been widely adopte...

Water-related hazards such as floods, droughts, and disease cause damage to an economy through the destruction of physical capital including property and infrastructure, the loss of human capital, and the interruption of economic activities, like trade and education. The question for policy makers is whether the impacts of water-related risk accrue...

Hydropower on the Great Lakes makes up a substantial fraction of regional electricity generation capacity. Hydropower producers on the Niagara River (flowing between lakes Erie and Ontario) operate as run-of-river, and changing lake levels alter interlake flows reducing both generation and revenues. Index-based insurance contracts, wherein contract...

This study presents a user-friendly software package, named VIC-Automated Setup Toolkit (VIC-ASSIST),accessible through an intuitive MATLAB graphical user interface. VIC-ASSIST enables users to navigate the model building process through prompts and automation, with an intention to promote the use of the model for both practical and educational pur...

Hydroclimatic stationarity is increasingly questioned as a default assumption in flood risk management (FRM), but successor methods are not yet established. Some potential successors depend on estimates of future flood quantiles, but methods for estimating future design storms are subject to high levels of uncertainty. Here we apply a Nonstationary...

Some of the greatest societal risks of climate change rise from the potential impacts to water supply. Yet prescribing adaptation policies in the near term is made difficult by the uncertainty in climate projections at relevant spatial scales and the conflating effects of uncertainties in emissions, model error, and internal variability. In this wo...

Water has a special role in the context of green growth, with important links to economic activity, ecosystem functioning and social well-being. There are three key pillars of planning that can be used to include water in green growth strategies – embracing risk, embracing uncertainty and embracing water allocation reform opportunities. One such me...

Nexus thinking is critical to jointly address growing water, energy, and food security challenges. This paper evaluates the water, energy, and food nexus (WEFN) in the Indus River of Pakistan using the Indus Basin Model Revised—Multi Year, a hydro-agro-economic model extended with an agricultural energy use module. Impacts of a range of climate cha...

The Indus Basin Model Revised (IBMR) is a hydro-agro-economic optimization model for agricultural investment planning across Pakistan's Indus Basin provinces. This study describes IBMR-2012, an update and modification of the model that reflects the current agro-economic conditions in Pakistan for the purpose of evaluating the impact of climate chan...

Advance knowledge of conflicting trajectories of water–energy–food (WEF) nexus is highly relevant for water policy and planning, especially for basins that cross national boundaries. The Brahmaputra River Basin in South Asia, home for 130 million people, is such a basin. Development of new hydropower projects, upstream water diversions and possible...

There are significant computational requirements for assessing climate change impacts on water resource system reliability andvulnerability, particularly when analyzing a wide range of plausible scenarios. These requirements often deter analysts from exhaustivelyidentifying climate hazards. This technical note investigates two approaches for genera...

1. Introduction As explained by Grey et al. (2013), most of the world's poor are deeply water insecure and face disproportionately large water-related risks resulting from their location in regions of particularly complex hydrology. These water-related risks are exacerbated by a general lack of good publicly-available water resources data in much o...

This paper applies an approach for determining water resources vulnerability caused by climate change to the New York City water supply system (NYCWSS). The results provide potential responses of the system to changes in climate and guidance that can inform short-term and long-term planning decisions. This research includes models of the hydrology...

Low water levels in the Great Lakes have recently had significant financial impacts on the region's commercial shipping, which transports hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of bulk goods each year. Cargo capacity is a function of a ship's draft, the distance between water level and the ship's bottom, and lower water levels force ships to reduce...

This article represents the second report by an ASCE Task Committee "Infrastructure Impacts of Landscape-driven Weather Change" under the ASCE Watershed Management Technical Committee and the ASCE Hydroclimate Technical Committee. Herein, the 'infrastructure impacts" are referred to as infrastructure-sensitive changes in weather and climate pattern...

Managing freshwater resources sustainably under future climatic and hydrological uncertainty poses novel challenges. Rehabilitation of ageing infrastructure and construction of new dams are widely viewed as solutions to diminish climate risk, but attaining the broad goal of freshwater sustainability will require expansion of the prevailing water re...

This book evaluates -using for the first time a single consistent methodology and the state-of-the-arte climate scenarios-, the impacts of climate change on hydro-power and irrigation expansion plans in Africa’s main rivers basins (Niger, Senegal, Volta, Congo, Nile, Zambezi, Orange); and outlines an approach to reduce climate risks through suitabl...

“Confronting Climate Uncertainty in Water Resources Planning and Project Design describes an approach to facing two fundamental and unavoidable issues brought about by climate change uncertainty in water resources planning and project design. The first is a risk assessment problem. The second relates to risk management. This book provides backgroun...

This paper presents a short history of water resources systems analysis from its beginnings in the Harvard Water Program, through its continuing evolution toward a general field of water resources systems science. Current systems analysis practice is widespread and addresses the most challenging water issues of our times, including water scarcity a...

The South Asia region requires major new energy resources to support its development goals. Hydropower development, especially in mountainous areas, is a largely untapped resource for low carbon energy. In countries like Nepal and Bhutan, it represents their most valuable natural resource, their key natural endowment to use for economic growth and...

Approaches for probability density function (pdf) development of future climate often assume that different climate models provide independent information, despite model similarities that stem from a common genealogy (models with shared code or developed at the same institution). Here we use an ensemble of projections from the Coupled Model Interco...

The Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrologic model is applied to the headwaters of the Arkansas River in the USA for the purpose of water supply evaluation. Modelling the hydrologic regime of the Arkansas River is a challenge due to the large number of diversions and regulations that might impact the natural streamflow. Meanwhile, most of th...

Climate nonstationarity and uncertainty raise important issues related to design and planning within the water sector. In addition, the water sector has acknowledged the need for improved methods of incorporating impacts of water resources development on ecosystems into project evaluation. We present a decision analytic approach to selecting flood...

This paper presents a decision-scaling based framework to determine whether one or more preselected planning alternatives for a multiobjective water-resources system are robust to a variety of nonstationary hydroclimatic conditions and modeling uncertainties. The decision-scaling methodology is advanced beyond previous applications with an efficien...

This article represents the first report by an ASCE Task Committee "Infrastructure Impacts of Landscape-driven Weather Change" under the ASCE Watershed Management Technical Committee and the ASCE Hydroclimate Technical Committee. In this first of a series of reports, it argues for explicitly considering the well-established feedbacks triggered by i...

This study tests the performance and uncertainty of calibration strategies for a spatially distributed hydrologic model in order to improve model simulation accuracy and understand prediction uncertainty at interior ungaged sites of a sparsely gaged watershed. The study is conducted using a distributed version of the HYMOD hydrologic model (HYMOD_D...