Modeling climate change uncertainties in water resources management models

The impact of climate change on hydrologic design and management of hydrosystems could be one of the important challenges faced by future practicing hydrologists and water resources managers. Many water resources managers currently rely on the historical hydrological data and adaptive real-time operations without consideration of the impact of climate change on major inputs influencing the behavior of hydrologic systems and the operating rules. Issues such as risk, reliability and robustness of water resources systems under different climate change scenarios were addressed in the past. However, water resources management with the decision maker's preferences attached to climate change has never been dealt with. This short paper discusses issues related to impacts of climate change on water resources management and application of a soft-computing approach, fuzzy set theory, for climate-sensitive management of hydrosystems. A real-life case study example is presented to illustrate the applicability of a soft-computing approach for handling the decision maker's preferences in accepting or rejecting the magnitude and direction of climate change. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.