Entirely located in the tropical region, elongating from 8°27' through 23°23'N (roughly 15 latitudes) and from 102°8' through 109°27'E (about 7.5 longitudes) with a long coastline of 3260 kilometers, Vietnam has a typical climate of tropical monsoon of a peninsula in the Southeast of the European - Asian continent. Annual precipitation in Vietnam is abundant but, unevenly distributed in time and space. Besides that, climate instability is caused by the complex interaction of natural conditions and synoptic patterns as well as human activities. Consequently, the frequency of extreme weather phenomena such as droughts, tropical cyclones, or floods has been increasingly recorded. This will potentially affect human life and socio-economic sectors.
Furthermore, water is a key resource for all forms of life. A changing climate substantially affects the water cycle since it is very sensitive to climate change. Water balance impacts of changing climate conditions are a possible threat to nature, human, and society. So, the knowledge of potential future changes in the hydrological cycle is very important for agricultural planning in any locality as well as for decision makers to develop possible mitigation and adaptation strategies to the likelihood of the changes in climate.
Therefore, in a context where Vietnam is considered as one of the countries to be adversely affected by climate change, especially for coastal regions, our project aims to clarify the variability and change of climate over such regions. The scenario of climate change and its impacts on flood events are developed exemplarily for the ThiVai river catchment, located in the coastal region of Southern Vietnam.
In this project, we developed and applied the combination of meteorological and hydrological modeling with an improvement of dynamic-statistical downscaling technology to diminish the bias from model outputs. A water balance model system Panta Rhei is coupled with the climate model outputs to produce the impacts of climate change on flood events.
The variability and change of climate as well as climate change signal is quantified. The climate change impacts on flood events and in particular its quantification for the ThiVai river catchment is produced.
MOET, DAAD
M.Sc. Nguyen Tien Thanh