It may seem a specious question with no practical use. In fact, it is a very current question, that many professionals are asking when they need to design a new plant or to simply revamp an existing.
The answer to this question, however, needs to be addressed with consciousness about the current (and evolving) climatic situation.
Global warming is changing the water regimes in most rivers and watercourses, making historical data obsolete and leaving lots of uncertainties with respect to future precipitation patterns and snow persistence.
A simple deterministic approach may not be the best choice. One needs to account for the possible climatic scenarios about the future emissions of CO2. This in fact will determine the pathways of expected temperature increase, with consequent feedbacks in the water cycle, namely snow cover, glacier ablation and precipitation intensity.
Waterjade has developed sophisticated models, including physically-based hydrological models and machine-learning algorithms, capable to downscale the results of the Global Meteorological Models according to local morphology and historical climate.
In this way it is possible to account for the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) of CO2 concentration in the calculations, providing, with a Probabilistic approach, the possible water scenarios in the target catchment.
