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The coincidence of floods and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) is a genuine multihazard problem. Since the beginning of 2020, many regions around the World have been experiencing this double hazard of serious flooding and the pandemic. There have been 70 countries with flood events occurring after detection of the country's first COVID‐19 case and hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated. The main objective of this article is to assess challenges that arise from complex intersections between the threat multipliers and to provide guidance on how to address them effectively. We consider the limitations of our knowledge including "unknown unknowns." During emergency evacuation, practicing social distancing can be very difficult. However, people are going to take action to respond to rising waters, even if it means breaking quarantine. This is an emergency manager's nightmare scenario: two potentially serious emergencies happening at once. During this unprecedented year (2020), we are experiencing one of the most challenging flood seasons we have seen in a while. Practical examples of issues and guides for managing floods and COVID‐19 are presented. We feel that a new approach is needed in dealing with multiple hazards. Our main messages are: a resilience approach is needed whether in response to floods or a pandemic; preparation is vital, in addition to defense; the responsible actors must be prepared with actions plans and command structure, while the general population must be involved in the discussions so that they are aware of the risk and the reasons for the actions they must take. This article is categorized under:Engineering Water > Methods [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Physical scaling ( SP) method is a statistical downscaling approach where model-based climate data are downscaled taking into consideration large-scale climate, elevation and land-cover at the location of interest. In this study, the downscaling skills of an ensemble of SP method and its variants and Statistical DownScaling Model ( SDSM) towards downscaling North American Regional Reanalysis ( NARR) temperature data are compared. Two downscaling approaches: direct and indirect, two versions: SP and surrounding pixel information and three functional forms: linear regression, quantile regression and generalized additive models are considered to prepare the method ensemble. To evaluate method performance, a leave-one-out cross-validation approach is adopted. Results indicate that SP method and its variants have comparable skill to SDSM. Further method skill is found to be only marginally influenced by the choice of method version and functional form, and considerably influenced by the choice of approach. The ensemble of models is thereafter used to downscale future air temperature projections made by a global climate model: FGOALS-s2. It is found that downscaled future projections are most significantly influenced by the choice of version, followed by the choice of approach and the choice of functional form in the decreasing order of importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The objective of this study is to investigate the vulnerability of different land-cover types to climate change. To this end, land-cover specific temperature change factors are quantified for the southern Saskatchewan region using a novel statistical downscaling model: physical scaling ( SP). SP model considers large-scale climate and regional physical characteristics like land-cover, elevation in its formulation and hence can be used to predict future temperature for different land-cover types under changing large-scale climatic and land-cover conditions. The model is validated by assessing its ability to downscale North American Regional Reanalysis ( NARR) derived surface (skin) temperature from an initial resolution of 32 km to 500 m. The downscaled NARR data are evaluated using a cross-validation approach over the period 2006-2013 with reference to MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ( MODIS) derived surface temperature estimates and satisfactory model performance is obtained (average RMSE = 0.03 K). The validated model is used to predict future surface temperature across the study region. Future land-cover projections are derived by downscaling land-use projections for Representative Concentration Pathways ( RCPs) 2.6 and 8.5 made by integrated assessment models: IMAGE and MESSAGE, respectively. An analysis of land-cover specific temperature changes between historical (2006-2013) and future (2081-2100) timelines indicate variations of up to 2 K between different land-cover classes. Vulnerability pattern of different land-cover classes differ significantly between day- and night-time. Further, variations of upto 1 K in projected changes are observed among different forest cover types. Closed shrubland is obtained as the most vulnerable forest-cover class whereas evergreen broadleaf forest is found to be the least vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The KnnCAD Version 4 weather generator algorithm for nonparametric, multisite simulations of temperature and precipitation data is presented. The K-nearest neighbor weather generator essentially reshuffles the historical data, with replacement. In KnnCAD Version 4, a block resampling scheme is introduced to preserve the temporal correlation structure in temperature data. Perturbation of the reshuffled variable data is also added to enhance the generation of extreme values. The Upper Thames River Basin in Ontario, Canada is used as a case study and the model is shown to simulate effectively the historical characteristics at the site. The KnnCAD Version 4 approach is shown to improve on the previous versions of the model and offers a major advantage over many parametric and semiparametric weather generators in that multisite use can be easily achieved without making statistical assumptions dealing with the spatial correlations and probability distributions of each variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides an assessment of possible future climate conditions for the Upper Thames River (UTR) basin. The interpretation of future climate from widely used global climate models has a large impact on the comparison of the simulated daily extreme precipitations. Unfortunately, literature relevant to analyzing precipitation extremes is limited and more work is necessary to develop strategies for assessing the vulnerability of extreme precipitation events on water resources and communities at both local and regional levels. The present study deals with six different atmosphere-ocean coupled general circulation models (AOGCMs) with up to three emission scenarios in order to generate a precipitation series for the 2050s. The data has been downscaled using a principal component analysis-integrated stochastic weather generator (WG-PCA) to produce a synthetic dataset for 54 years. The variability between the AOGCMs and their emission scenarios are investigated, as well as the performance of the WG-PCA generator in producing extreme precipitation events. The comparative analysis of 14 different scenarios shows that the AOGCM results are variable and need to be carefully screened before using them for future climate change impact assessments in the UTR basin. Future work is needed on regional studies to explore local characteristics of precipitation extremes and improve the model quality by introducing more input variables relevant to the precipitation extremes. Copyright © 2010 Royal Meteorological Society [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]