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Faisal Hossain
Editor
Resilience
of Large Water
Management
Infrastructure
Solutions from Modern
Atmospheric Science
Resilience of Large Water Management
Infrastructure
Faisal Hossain
Editor
Resilience of Large Water

Management Infrastructure
Solutions from Modern Atmospheric Science
With advisory support from The Task Committee

on Infrastructure Impacts of Landscape-driven
Weather Change under the ASCE Watershed
Management Technical Committee and the
ASCE Hydroclimate Technical Committee
123
Editor
Faisal Hossain
Department of Civil
and Environmental Engineering
University of Washington
Seattle, WA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-26431-4 ISBN 978-3-030-26432-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26432-1
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part
of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
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the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
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authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
Infrastructure that manages our water resources (such as dams and reservoirs,
irrigation systems, channels, navigation waterways, water and wastewater treatment
facilities, storm drainage systems, levees, urban water distribution, and sanitation
systems) are critical to all sectors of an economy. Yet, they are aging beyond their
design lifespan in many parts of the world. In addition, these infrastructures are
subjected to excessive “wear and tear” from factors such as (but not limited to) rising
water demand, increasing frequency of flooding from urbanization or human
encroachment of water bodies. Such water management infrastructures, by virtue
of their service to society, are also directly or indirectly responsible for changes to
the surrounding landscape. For example, a newly built water supply distribution
system favors a faster growth rate of urban development which then leads to land-
scape transforming to one that is more impervious. Similarly, a large flood control
and irrigation dam can increase downstream urbanization and convert barren or
forested land to irrigated landscape. Inversely, by changing a river’s or lake’s edge
through levees and seawalls can cause naturally irrigated areas to become barren.
The body of knowledge accumulated by the atmospheric science community since
the early 1970s informs us that changes in extreme weather and climate can be a
direct product of such landscape modification. Thus, the issue of infrastructure
resilience becomes directly relevant as large infrastructures are usually designed to
handle “worst-case” or extreme weather and climate scenarios in mind.
Realizing the importance of large water infrastructures, efforts have already
begun on understanding the sustainability and resilience of such systems under
changing conditions expected in the future. These changing conditions can be due to
a variety of factors such as global warming, land-cover/land-use change,
industrialization/urbanization, and demographic forces (increasing population). In
early 2014, an American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Task Committee
(TC) was set up titled “Committee Infrastructure Impacts of Landscape-driven
Weather Change” under the ASCE Watershed Management Technical Committee
and the ASCE Hydroclimate Technical Committee. The TC was tasked with
v
vi Preface
providing the engineering community additional “scenarios” (from modern atmo-

spheric and climate science) for improving infrastructure resilience for securing
water supply and protection against water hazards.
Development of the Book
The following key arguments can be made for the timeliness of such a book:
1. Infrastructure that manages water resources (dams, irrigation systems, channels,
storm management systems, levees, etc.), while being critical to vital sectors
of the economy, are aging in the USA and the rest of the world.
2. Large-scale water infrastructures are directly, indirectly responsible for and/or
simply experience, through aging, climate/weather-sensitive changes to the
surrounding landscape. These landscape changes consequently interact with
local, regional, and even planetary scale forcings (such as greenhouse gas-driven
global warming) and can alter the future behavior of extreme events to an
amplitude or phase space not recorded before.
3. It is believed that the civil engineering community is not yet harnessing very
effectively the vast body of knowledge that has accumulated in this field of
local-to-regional drivers of extreme weather/climate beyond the more
well-known greenhouse gas drivers. This is despite the fact that the first field
campaign to study the impact of urbanization of weather kicked off in 1970s in
St. Louis (MO) called METROMEX. There are numerous such findings that
have accumulated over the past decades by the land-use/land-cover community,
although most are not as directly investigated for the immediate benefit of
engineering design/operations.
With these motivations in mind, the Task Committee was formed with four key
objectives (each being a unique task):
(1) Define “Infrastructure Resilience” for water infrastructure at the intersection of
weather and climate;
(2) Identify knowledge gaps on the role of local-to-regional landscape drivers of
weather and climate of relevance to engineering;
(3) Identify effective and complementary approaches to assimilate knowledge
discovery on local (mesoscale)-to-regional landscape drivers to improve prac-
tices on design, operations, and preservation of large water infrastructure
systems;
(4) Identify an effective approach to start a conversation with the larger civil
engineering education community on the ASCE Body of Knowledge
(BOK) with particular focus on identifying ways to understand the engineering
implications of prognostic uncertainty of climate/weather models.
Preface vii
The ASCE Task Committee Members in Advisory Role
The Task Committee members were:

Faisal Hossain, University of Washington—Chair
Ed Beighley, Northeastern University—Co-Chair
Casey Brown, University of Massachusetts—Secretary
Steve Burian, University of Utah
Dev Niyogi, Purdue University
Vincent Tidwell, Sandia Laboratories
Anindita Mitra, CREA Affiliates
Roger A. Pielke Sr., University of Colorado
Jie Chen, Hong Kong University
Jeffrey Arnold, US Army Corps of Engineers
Shahrbanou Madadgar, University of California, Irvine
Dave Wegner, Senior Staff, US House of Representatives—retired
During 2014–2017, the TC met mostly via teleconference meetings or group

email exchanges to have discussions for each task, usually at one meeting per 2
months. In addition, the TC chair (Faisal Hossain) or Co-Chair, Ed Beighley,
reported updates regularly to ASCE EWRI Technical Council for Watershed
Management each month.
As the committee went about completing each task, some of the tasks were
prepared in an end-to-end report and submitted to a journal (typically an ASCE
venue). For example, the very first task of defining resilience and identifying the
landscape-change drivers has appeared as a forum paper in ASCE’s Journal of
Hydrologic Engineering. Forum papers are meant to be thought-provoking and
timely opinion pieces that are not original research to get the civil engineering
community engaged in a discussion. The second task on the identification of
knowledge gaps was pursued in the form of surveying water managers with a lot of
experience in the practice of water resources decision making for large management
infrastructures. This survey appeared in PLOS One (an open-access journal). The
third task of identifying methods for resilience assessment is currently being pur-
sued as a forum paper in ASCE’s Journal of Infrastructure Systems. For remaining
tasks, the TC pulled from literature relevant work on the application of numerical
models for the atmosphere for simulation of extreme storms and their probable
maximum precipitation.
What follows in the rest of the book is essentially a packaged version of the
published work listed above in various forums, rewritten in a wholesale manner for
a more multi-disciplinary audience. Chapters 1–6 consolidate all relevant material
produced by the TC on water infrastructure to make it easier for the practitioner to
find the material in one place. In addition, two guest writers (Chaps. 7 and 8) who
are experts in the field were also sought for timely commentary or review of the
state of the art. Each chapter was proofread and then re-edited by a professional
writer to make the entire book more readable as one single reference manual.
viii Preface
Lastly, this book compilation could not have been possible without the active
and tireless support from all the TC members, editorial assistant, Li-Chien Wang, at
University of Washington and a highly skilled professional editor—Dallas Staley. It
is because of their dedication that we are now able to put all the things together in
the form of a book and make it relevant for practitioners engaged in water man-
agement. The book is certainly not without its fair share of flaws and typos for
which the editor (Faisal Hossain) takes full responsibility. We will make an attempt
to correct these errors in a future edition or through adding a list of errata. We hope
engineers and practitioners who routinely deal with large water management
infrastructure will find this book worthwhile for improving the state of the art on
infrastructures for water management.
Seattle, USA Faisal Hossain

Contents
1 Resilience of Water Management Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Faisal Hossain, Jeffrey Arnold, Dev Niyogi, Roger A. Pielke Sr.,
Ji Chen, Dave Wegner, Anindita Mitra, Steve Burian,
Shahrbanou Madadgar, Ed Beighley, Casey Brown
and Vincent Tidwell
2 Survey of Water Managers for Twenty-First Century
Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Ji Chen, Dave Wegner, Anindita Mitra, Steve Burian, Ed Beighley,
Casey Brown and Vincent Tidwell
3 Current Approaches for Resilience Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Faisal Hossain, Dev Niyogi, Roger A. Pielke Sr., Ji Chen,
Dave Wegner, Anindita Mitra, Steve Burian, Ed Beighley,
Casey Brown and Vincent Tidwell
4 Application of Numerical Atmospheric Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Xiaodong Chen, Faisal Hossain and Lai-Yung Leung
5 Infrastructure-Relevant Storms of the Last Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Xiaodong Chen and Faisal Hossain
6 Sensitivity of Probable Maximum Precipitation (PMP) . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Steven Adam Stratz and Faisal Hossain
7 A Recommended Paradigm Shift in the Approach to Risks
to Large Water Infrastructure in the Coming Decades . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Roger A. Pielke Sr. and Faisal Hossain
8 Safety Design of Water Infrastructures in a Modern Era . . . . . . . . . 111
Xiaodong Chen
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 The percentage of dams per state that will be over 50 years old
in 2020 (reproduced from USACE report and
Hossain et al. 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Fig. 1.2 Beam loading example to demonstrate the potential impact of a
local random perturbation to a deterministic load in which the
perturbation is triggered by the bending of the beam; the upper
panel shows the conventional situation where it is assumed that
W is a deterministic variable, whereas the lower panel shows
that W is now a random (stochastic or deterministic) variable
due to ΔW load added through a feedback mechanism triggered
when a certain amount of bending has occurred . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Fig. 1.3 Floodplain zone for a 10-year flood, 100-year flood, and PMF;
critical infrastructure is usually placed outside the boundaries
of the PMF floodplain (recreated from Queensland Government
Australia 2011, courtesy of WMAwater) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Fig. 1.4 Schematic of landscape change drivers on extreme weather and
climate and their compounding effect in the context of societal
feedbacks and services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Fig. 2.1 Profile distribution of respondents for the ASCE TC survey
on perceptions of water resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Fig. 2.2 Response to Question 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Fig. 2.9 Response to Question 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Fig. 3.1 A causal loop diagram approach proposed by Montgomery et al.
(2012) for infrastructure resilience improvement. The examples
for the causal loop are for flooding impact on infrastructure . . . . 41
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 4.1 48-h (0000 UTC 1 May—0000 UTC 3 May, 2010) total rainfall
from Stage IV data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Fig. 4.2 Generic framework for exploring optimal model configuration
for reconstruction of extreme storms recommended by the water
management community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Fig. 4.3 Spatial domain in the modeling framework for the Nashville
2010 storm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Fig. 4.4 Stage IV observed and WRF simulated 48-h (0000 UTC
1 May—0000 UTC 3 May 2010 total rainfall during Nashville
2010 storm event . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Fig. 4.5 Evaluation of storm reconstruction as simulated by WRF . . . . . . 55
Fig. 4.6 Evaluation involving multiple aspects of rainfall simulation
quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Fig. 5.1 Location of the 10 big storms in this study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Fig. 5.2 Evaluation of reconstructed big storms: spatial coverages.
Panels show a the probability of detection; b the false alert ratio;
c the frequency bias; and d the Heidke skill score. The panels
a, b, c were computed using 0 mm/day rainfall threshold
(any rainy grids/days were counted as rainy), and panel d was
computed using 5 mm/day threshold (grids/days
with >5 mm/day were counted as rainy) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Fig. 5.3 Evaluation of reconstructed big storms: correlations with
observed rainfall maps. Panels show a the correlation coefficient
between simulated and observed daily rainfall; b the correlation
between the simulated and observed maximum 1-day rainfall
maps; c the correlation between the maximum 2-day rainfall
maps; and d the correlation between the maximum 3-day
rainfall maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Fig. 5.4 Correlations between the best reconstructions
and observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Fig. 5.5 Maximum 3-day rainfall from simulation and observation
(post-1979). Panels a, d, g are the WRF simulation, and panels
b, e, h are the gauge observation from Livneh dataset. Panels
c, f, i are the difference (WRF—obs). All the units are mm . . . . 70
(1948–1979). Panels a, d, g are the WRF simulation, and panels
b, e, h are the gauge observation from the Livneh dataset.
Panels c, f, i are the difference (WRF—obs). All the units
are mm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
(pre-1948). Panels a, d, g, j are the WRF simulation, and panels
b, e, h, k are the gauge observation from the Livneh dataset.
Panels c, f, i, l are the difference (WRF—obs). All the units
are mm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
List of Figures xiii
Fig. 6.1 The overall PMP estimation approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Fig. 6.2 Selected impounded river basin and dam sites for investigation
of HMR-PMP with non-stationary climate forcings. Leftmost
panel—American River (Folsom Dam); Middle panel—
Owyhee River (Owyhee Dam); Rightmost panel—Holston
River (South Holston Dam) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Fig. 7.1 The climate system, consisting of the atmosphere, oceans, land,
and cryosphere. Important state variables for each sphere of the
climate system are listed in the boxes. For the purposes of this
report, the Sun, volcanic emissions, and human-caused
emissions of greenhouse gases and changes to the land surface
are considered external to the climate system.
From NRC (2005) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Fig. 7.2 Available at: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/
gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.png . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Fig. 7.3 A farm in Kukkal, Tamil Nadu, India, captured on April 25,
2009. Image Credit Vinod Sankar/flickr.com/CC BY SA2.0.
Available at: https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/user_resources/
data_in_action/irrigation_and_land_use_change_in_
tamil_nadu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Fig. 7.4 USGS land-cover data for (left) pre-1900 natural land cover
and (right) 1993 land use. From Marshall et al. (2004) . . . . . . . . 102
Fig. 7.5 Ground-level view of burning savanna grasslands in South
Africa. Greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and solid carbon soot
particulates are components of the emissions. When inhaled, the
particulates lead to respiratory problems. From https://
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BiomassBurning/ . . . . . . . . . . 102
Fig. 7.6 Shortwave aerosol direct radiative forcing (ADRF) for top-of
atmosphere (TOA), surface, and atmosphere. From Matsui and
Pielke Sr. (2006) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Fig. 7.7 Nitrogen deposition (teragrams per square meter) projected by
NCAR’s atmospheric chemistry model, coupled to the
Community Atmosphere Model, for the year 2100, based on the
IPCC’s A2 emissions scenario. Areas in orange and red show
the largest increases in deposition. These largely coincide with
those land areas shown at left where plant growth is most
strongly limited by nitrogen, such as eastern North America,
Europe, and Southern Asia. Obtained from UCAR newsletter . . . 103
Fig. 7.8 Framework depicting two interpretations of vulnerability to
climate change: (left) outcome vulnerability and (right)
contextual vulnerability. Adapted by D. Staley from the works
of Füssel (2009) and O’Brien et al. (2007). From Pielke and
Wilby (2012) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 7.9 Schematic of the spectrum of risks to water resources. Other key
resources associated with food, energy, human health, and
ecosystem function can replace water resources in the central
circle. From the work of Hossain et al. (2011) and Pielke and
Wilby (2012) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Fig. 8.1 A naturally intuitive transition from traditional PMP to
physics-based PMP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Fig. 8.2 Machine learning-based storm classification. Here the idea is
similar to that in Chen and Hossain (2018), but some steps are
automated using machine learning techniques. As a result, some
artificial parameters are avoided, and the results would be more
objective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Fig. 8.3 Relationship between extreme precipitation and meteorological
factors. The analysis is done over the ERA-Interim reanalysis
product, following the methodology in Chen and Hossain
(2018) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
List of Tables
Table 4.1 Binary results indices for evaluation metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Table 4.2 Definition of evaluation metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Table 4.3 48-h total simulated rainfall (normalized using
observed total) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Table 5.1 Duration and characteristics of the 10 big storms of relevance
to water management infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Table 5.2 CSI scores for the 10 storms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Table 5.3 Model configuration codes used in the results and discussion
sections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Table 5.4 WRF simulation duration of the 10 storms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Table 6.1 Non-stationary 72-h PMP values for various LULC scenarios
for the upper American River Watershed (using RAMS
numerical modeling data) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Table 6.2 Non-stationary 72-h PMP values for various LULC scenarios
for the Owyhee River Watershed (using RAMS numerical
modeling data) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Table 6.3 Re-calculated PMP values for 10,000 square miles over the
Eastern USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Table 6.4 Non-stationary 72-h PMP values for the Holston River
Watershed (using observed dew point trends) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Table 7.1 Contrast between a top-down versus bottom-up assessment
of the vulnerability of resources to climate variability
and change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Table 7.2 Two interpretations of vulnerability in climate
change research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
xv
Chapter 1
Resilience of Water Management
Infrastructure

Ji Chen, Dave Wegner, Anindita Mitra, Steve Burian,
Shahrbanou Madadgar, Ed Beighley, Casey Brown
and Vincent Tidwell
Introduction
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 systems to the land-atmosphere
system via landscape change. A definition for Infrastructure Resilience (IR) at the
intersection of extreme weather and climate is provided for the engineering com-
munity. The broader range of views and issues than what is currently in the front view
of engineering practice is expected to ensure more robust approaches for resilience
assessment by the engineering community by affording a greater number of
With permission from ASCE, this chapter is adapted from: Local-To-Regional Landscape
Drivers of Extreme Weather and Climate: Implications for Water Infrastructure Resilience,
ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, Vol 20, 7, July 2015.
F. Hossain (&)
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
98015, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
J. Arnold
Institute of Water Resources, US Army Corps of Engineers, Seattle, WA 9815, USA
D. Niyogi
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University, 550 Stadium Mall Drive, West
Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
R. A. Pielke Sr.
University of Colorado, CIRES, Boulder, CO 80309-0216, USA
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1

F. Hossain (ed.), Resilience of Large Water Management Infrastructure,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26432-1_1
2 F. Hossain et al.
‘scenarios’ in its decision-making. The engineering community needs to understand

the predictive uncertainty of changes to extreme weather and climate and how it can be
addressed to improve infrastructure design and operations.
Why Water Management Infrastructure?
Today, water infrastructure of the nation is critical to vital sectors of the economy
such as energy, transportation, food, and health. These infrastructures comprise
dams, levees, irrigation systems, city drainage systems, water supply and hydro-
power generation systems, nuclear power plants, and flood control structures,
among many. Unfortunately, of all the different types of infrastructures the civil
engineering profession deals with, the water management infrastructure facilities
share a consistently poor rating of grade ‘D’ or lower according to the ASCE
Infrastructure report card (ASCE 2013). For example, most US dams will be at least
50 years or older by 2020 (Fig. 1.1) and yet they provide major cities with vital
water supply during dry periods (see Hossain and Kalyanapu 2012 in ‘Civil
Engineering’ Magazine). This aging infrastructure problem has prompted reex-
amination of critical infrastructure assumptions by the engineers who design and
manage these structures (Hossain et al. 2012). In the USA, dams provide about 60%
of total renewable energy (6% of total energy) and 60% of water for irrigation.
J. Chen
Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Pokfulam,
Hong Kong
D. Wegner
Formerly with Water and Power Subcommittee, Water Resources and the Environment
Subcommittee at U.S. House of Representatives, Washington DC, USA
A. Mitra
CREÄ Affiliates, 2319 N 65th Street, Seattle, WA 98103, USA
S. Burian
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Utah, 110 Central
Campus Drive, Ste 2044, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
S. Madadgar
Portland State University, Portland, OR 97207, USA
E. Beighley
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University, 360
Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA
C. Brown
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst,
130 Natural Resources Road, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
V. Tidwell
Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM 87185, USA
1 Resilience of Water Management Infrastructure 3
Fig. 1.1 The percentage of dams per state that will be over 50 years old in 2020 (reproduced from
USACE report and Hossain et al. 2009)
Globally, about 20% of world food production (40% of the world’s irrigated water)
and 7% of world energy demand is met with large water infrastructures such as
dams, levees, and irrigation systems (Vorosmarty et al. 2010; Biemans et al. 2011).
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the USA has 14,780
wastewater treatment facilities and 19,739 wastewater pipe systems. Although
access to centralized treatment systems is widespread, the ASCE Infrastructure
report card (ASCE 2013) states that the condition of many of these systems is also
poor, with aging pipes and inadequate capacity leading to annual discharges of 900
billion gallons of untreated sewage. Emerging challenges are likely to increase
water treatment costs. For example, in 2009, the EPA reported to Congress that the
states had assessed 16% of America’s stream miles and found that 36% of those
miles were unfit for use by fish and wildlife, 28% were unfit for human recreation,
18% were unfit for use as a public water supply, and 10% were unfit for agricultural
use (source: www.epa.gov). Thus, there is now a critical need to reexamine water
management infrastructure from the standpoint of resilience.
From the standpoint of resilience, two factors make a reassessment necessary.
First, we are living in a changing climate where downstream effects of greenhouse
gas emissions are expected to significantly alter surface water availability by the
end of the twenty-first century (IPCC 2007). Second, climate change, water
4 F. Hossain et al.
budgets, and socioeconomic population data models clearly indicate that water
stress is projected to worsen by 2025 in the USA (Sun et al. 2008) and globally
(Vorosmarty et al. 2005, 2010). Even if the expected impact of climate change is
ignored, rising water demands due to population growth will heavily dictate the
future state of water systems (Gleick 2002).
Broadening the Focus on Drivers of Change for

Resilience Assessment
Realizing the importance of water management infrastructures, efforts have already

begun on understanding the resilience of water infrastructure systems under drivers
of change, such as climate. Such efforts could now benefit the engineering com-
munity from leveraging the scientific community’s understanding of additional
contributing factors of climate change. These factors comprise the local-regional
human drivers of landscape change. These additional contributing factors provide a
complementary view to the more well-known greenhouse gas (GHG)-based plan-
etary warming as they focus more on mesoscale-to-regional changes (radiative and
non-radiative) to weather/climate. Despite the three decades of research by the
land-use community that has accumulated on the human impact of landscape
change on weather and climate, the engineering infrastructure community appears
less aware of these additional drivers of change. Such drivers do not have a uni-
directional impact on weather and climate but can be modeled at the infrastructure
scale (100 m–1 km) with useful accuracy. In this chapter, knowledge gaps are
identified that currently prevents the engineering community from formulating
practical solutions to more resilient water infrastructure building.
Local-to-Regional Landscape Driver of Extreme Weather

and Climate
[Adapted from Hossain et al. (2015).]

With many calculations, one can win; with few one cannot. How much less chance
of victory has one who makes none at all!—Sun Tzu in ‘The Art of War’
The above statement made by Sun Tzu in his seminal book ‘The Art of War’
more than two thousand years ago summarizes best the mission statement of the
ASCE Task Committee (TC) on the topic of this chapter. In early 2014, the TC was
tasked with providing the engineering community additional ‘calculations’ for
improving infrastructure resilience for securing water supply and protection against
water hazards. It was set up in follow-up to a forum article that appeared in 2012 in
ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering (Hossain et al. 2012) and in Civil
Engineering Magazine (Dec 2012 issue). These articles encouraged engineers to

explore the well-established feedbacks triggered by large infrastructures on the
land-atmosphere system for decision-making related to water management, better
design and operations. The goal of this introductory chapter is to shed light on the
findings of the initial round of dialogue within the TC to understand the role of
landscape change for improving resilience of our water infrastructure.
Infrastructure that manages our water resources (such as dams and reservoirs,
irrigation systems, channels, navigation waterways, water and wastewater treatment
facilities, storm drainage systems, levees, urban water distribution, and sanitation
systems) is critical to all sectors of an economy. Yet they are aging beyond their
lifespan and design in many parts of the world. In addition, these infrastructures are
subjected to excessive ‘wear and tear’ from rising water demand, increasing fre-
quency of flooding from urbanization or human encroachment of water bodies.
Such water infrastructures, by virtue of their service to society, are also directly or
indirectly responsible for changes to the surrounding landscape. For example, a
newly built water supply distribution system favors a faster growth rate of urban
development which then leads to landscape transforming to one that is more
impervious. The body of knowledge accumulated by the atmospheric science
community since the early 1970s informs us that changes in extreme weather and
climate can be a direct product of such landscape modification. Thus, the issue of
infrastructure resilience becomes directly relevant as large infrastructures are usu-
ally designed to handle ‘worst-case’ or extreme weather and climate scenarios in
mind. For a sample of the cumulative body of work on effects of landscape change
on extreme weather and climate, the reader is referred to Cotton and Pielke (2007)
and Pielke et al. (2011).
The commonly observed landscape changes around water infrastructures also
interact with other local, regional, hemispheric, and global-scale atmospheric
forcings and can often alter the future behavior of extreme events to an amplitude or
phase-space not recorded before or during the design phase of the infrastructure.
According to the Clausius–Clapeyron relationship, the water holding capacity of air
increases approximately 7% per 1 °C warming (at 288 K). In the USA, the increase
in water holding capacity is already evident from recorded increases in dew point
temperatures over the last 40 years (Robinson 2000). If such a trend continues, then
it implies that future extreme storms would occur under conditions of increased
available moisture, which can result in potentially higher intensities and higher
frequency of occurrence of extreme precipitation events (Kunkel et al. 2013;
Trenberth 2011). It should be noted, however, that observational studies of water
vapor do not yet indicate a consistent trend on water vapor (Wang et al. 2008;
Vonder Haar et al. 2012).
Future resilience of water infrastructure is dictated by the future behavior of
extreme patterns of weather and climate, and because wear and tear are a constant
stressor magnified by the increasing demand for or damage from water. It is
therefore important for the engineering community to recognize these
local-to-regional drivers of landscape change for a more robust assessment of
resilience. While there is a broader and complex impact of such landscape change,
6 F. Hossain et al.
Fig. 1.2 Beam loading example to demonstrate the potential impact of a local random
perturbation to a deterministic load in which the perturbation is triggered by the bending of the
beam; the upper panel shows the conventional situation where it is assumed that W is a
deterministic variable, whereas the lower panel shows that W is now a random (stochastic or
deterministic) variable due to ΔW load added through a feedback mechanism triggered when a
certain amount of bending has occurred
it is the local effect (or local perturbation) that is important for understanding
vulnerability or resilience of water infrastructure. Many such local effects may
warrant a ‘relook’ of parameters and factors of safety for which an infrastructure is
designed or operated. In this report, the local effects are referred to as a ‘delta x’
type perturbation and a random function. The important question to ask the engi-
neering community now is whether this delta x is large enough to require a
wholesale reassessment of infrastructure resilience.
This concept can be demonstrated through a classic beam loading scenario,
where the standard shear force and bending moment diagram need to be derived for
a known deterministic load W (Fig. 1.2). If the load is perturbed randomly by ΔW
due to the bending of the beam itself, then the derivation of the shear force and
bending moment diagrams become a non-trivial process. The ΔW variable could
also be represented as a chaotic variable due to the nonlinearity of the
land-atmosphere feedbacks, as demonstrated in Zeng et al. (1993). Thus, ΔW may
not be a random (stochastic) effect but a result of deterministic chaos (i.e., deter-
ministic random variable), which consequentially may make the problem of
deriving the shear force and bending moment diagrams with the ΔW feedback all
the more tractable. Today, in conventional engineering practice, future design or
operations changing impacts directly triggered by the infrastructure itself are not
addressed proactively to estimate such local perturbations. Thus, it is now imper-
ative to understand the importance (or the lack of) of such local perturbations
triggered by local-regional landscape change on the land-atmosphere system.
This chapter does not strive to seek consensus on any particular view or rec-
ommend a universal design/operations strategy for improving resilience. It does not
claim to present the most comprehensive and up-to-date synopsis of knowledge on
the topic available today. Rather, the key goal is to lay out the diverse perspectives
and findings on the impact of landscape change that have potential implications for
our current and future water infrastructure. Hereafter, we will use the term ‘climate’
as the statistics of weather events over historical (i.e., already occurred)
multi-decadal time periods, wherein the actual weather event in the future will
dictate resilience.
Why Is Landscape Change Important?
Pielke et al. (2011) summarize where the world currently appears to stand (as of
2011) in giving landscape drivers its due recognition for climate as follows:
A great deal of attention is devoted to changes in atmospheric composition and the asso-
ciated regional responses. Less attention is given to the direct influence by human activity
on regional climate caused by modification of the atmosphere’s lower boundary—the
Earth’s surface.
This perspective has not changed as of 2013 (Mahmood et al. 2013). According
to Forster et al. (2007), the direct radiative impact of global landscape change since
the industrial revolution has been a reduction in the amount 0.2 ± 0.2 W m−2.
Being a relatively smaller number (compared to the radiative forcing from green-
house gas emissions which is an order higher), Pielke et al. (2011) and many others
(such as Narisma and Pitman 2006; Pitman 2003) have suggested that this is why
landscape change is mostly omitted from the climate models used in previous
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports up until the fourth
Assessment Report (AR4). Yet this omission is a mistake as weather events that are
hydrologically important result from regional and local atmospheric circulation
features and are little, if at all, affected by global average forcings. More impor-
tantly, there is a local perturbation of significance to the infrastructure (as will be
elaborated next from published literature). An unexpected casualty of this historical
omission has been that the engineering profession was deprived of additional
‘calculations’ as more reliable alternatives to highly uncertain and model-based
climate change impacts that are predicted from global climate models (GCMs). As
an example of the current limitations of the GCMs, Stephens et al. (2010) con-
cluded that ‘models produce precipitation approximately twice as often as that
observed and make rainfall far too lightly…. The differences in the character of
model precipitation are systemic and have a number of important implications for
modeling the coupled Earth system…little skill in precipitation [is] calculated at
individual grid points, and thus applications involving downscaling of grid point
precipitation to yet even finer-scale resolution has little foundation and relevance to
the real Earth system.’
8 F. Hossain et al.
The interactions between local-to-regional drivers of climate (such as landscape

change) with hemispheric or planetary forcings (such as rising greenhouse gas
emissions and other changes in atmospheric composition) have also not received
the attention they should have. Another reason often cited for this is that the impact
of planetary-scale greenhouse gas emissions is consistently unidirectional (i.e., an
increase in positive radiative forcing) while the role of landscape change can result
in both cooling and warming depending on other ambient conditions of the region.
For example, Narisma and Pitman (2006) explored the relative role of land-cover
change in the context of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and warming for
the Australian climate. Their study clearly showed the interaction of the unidirec-
tional warming with bidirectional landscape change wherein reforestation resulted
in a 40% reduction in temperature increases while deforestation had the effect of
amplifying warming. These interactions were found to be highly localized. There
appears to have been little research reported until 2011 on local-regional landscape
interactions with global forcings with a view to guiding the engineering community
for improving infrastructure resilience against future change in extreme weather.
The more localized and variable sensitivity of landscape change to extreme
weather should be a strong reason why engineers need to be aware this landscape
change is an additional driver. Engineering practice concerning design and opera-
tions is never geographically universal. One size does not fit all. Infrastructure has
variable factors of safety that are driven by the ambient environmental risks, which
are spatially variable. A perfect example of this can be found in reservoir sizing.
The dust bowl of the 1930s and the ensuing high rates of soil erosion led to a
necessary oversizing of reservoirs built in the 1940s in the Great Plains and
Midwestern United States. Another appropriate example of how engineering
practice has inadvertently accepted the variable response of landscape to extreme
weather is ‘Probable Maximum Precipitation’ (or PMP). According to the American
Meteorological Society (AMS 1959), PMP, which is a design parameter for storm
and flood drainage infrastructure, is defined as, ‘the theoretically greatest depth of
precipitation for a given duration that is physically possible over a particular
drainage area.’ [Note: PMP is visited in Chaps. 5 and 6 of this book].
In the USA, the currently practiced PMP values reported in Hydrometeorological
Reports (HMRs) are derived from maximum persisting humidity records for storms
east of the 105th meridian or from sea surface temperature (SST) for storms west of
the 105th meridian (Stratz and Hossain 2014). The argument for this differential
approach has been that storms on the west coast are due to large synoptic-scale
moisture originating in the Pacific Ocean and thus they are not as sensitive to
landscape change effects as heavy storms in the Southeast or Eastern seaboard.
Overall, the TC suggests that the impacts of landscape change on extreme weather
should be considered with other issues that are currently in front of the engineering
profession. The civil engineering community is not yet effectively harnessing the
vast body of knowledge that has accumulated in the field of local-to-regional drivers
of extreme weather and climate. This is despite the fact that the first field campaign to
study the impact of urbanization on weather occurred in the 1970s in St. Louis
(MO) called METROMEX (Chagnon 1979). A rich history of observational and
modeling studies that followed METROMEX over the last three decades have
reported a wide array of attributable impacts of land-use change, such as increasing
precipitation intensity (e.g., Barnston and Schickedanz 1984; Shepherd et al. 2002,
2010), frequency of convective storms (e.g., Pielke and Avissar 1990; Taylor 2010),
and tornado activity around urban areas (Kellner and Niyogi 2013).
For example, recent research using mesoscale numerical models has shown that
PMP, which is a legally mandated design parameter in the USA for high hazard
dams (those upstream of a population center), can vary in the range of 2–7% due to
post-dam changes to landscape such as irrigation and urbanization (Woldemichael
et al. 2012). Such studies also report that the nature of change is dependent on the
surrounding terrain and underlying moisture convergence conditions (leeward or
windward side of orographic mountains) and geographic location (Woldemichael
et al. 2014). Beauchamp et al. (2013) hypothesized a 6% increase in PMP values by
2070 from projected increases in atmospheric humidity based on simulations by a
GCM for a local watershed in Canada. Several global climate models (GCMs)
forecast a 20–30% increase by 2100 A.D. in maximum precipitable water due to
greenhouse gas emissions (Kunkel et al. 2013).
Landscape changes have also been known to alter Probable Maximum Flood
(PMF) not just through increased runoff due to reduced infiltration, but also via the
atmospheric pathway of PMP changes. In the ‘Design of Small Dam’ manual
produced by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), the case of a Texas reservoir
that experienced eight times the design PMF inflow due to rapid urbanization
effects is a well-known example to engineers of the non-atmospheric effects of
landscape change on water infrastructure resilience (USBR 1987). Recent research
now indicates that the terrestrial hydrologic effects can be compounded by PMP
modifications through land-atmosphere feedbacks. A recent study on the American
River in California and Folsom Dam by Yigzaw et al. (2013) reports the need to
estimate and perhaps account for future land-cover changes upfront during the dam
design and operation formulation phase by considering the gradual climatic effects
on PMF via PMP modification. This compounding effect can also manifest in
sedimentation rates. Soil erosion, which is usually dictated by rainfall intensity as
well as landscape change, results in reservoir sedimentation through inflow and a
gradual loss of reservoir storage. With changing patterns of extreme precipitation
through landscape change, the engineering community needs to understand how
reservoir storage would be impacted to address the multiple objectives (such as
flood control, water supply, and hydropower).
Another implication for infrastructure resilience is on land-use zoning for
placement of critical infrastructure. Many, if not all, of the most critical infras-
tructures (such as large schools, hospitals, waste treatment facilities, nuclear power
plants) for society are often placed outside the PMF floodplain. The PMF floodplain
has historically been treated as an ‘absolute’ boundary in land-use planning
(Fig. 1.3). If this PMF floodplain is deemed no longer absolute and can potentially
encroach on the previously designated safe zone for critical infrastructures, then the
quantification of future risks associated with a changing PMF via PMP and land-
scape change becomes urgent.
10 F. Hossain et al.
Fig. 1.3 Floodplain zone for a 10-year flood, 100-year flood, and PMF; critical infrastructure is
usually placed outside the boundaries of the PMF floodplain (recreated from Queensland
Government Australia 2011, courtesy of WMAwater)
Engineers need to recognize that there has been massive but gradual redistri-
bution of water through artificial reservoirs, numerous irrigation schemes,
land-cover change and urbanization since the early 1900s. Such redistribution has
altered the regional and global water cycle with local and regional implications of
the change. For example, numerous irrigation schemes have contributed to
increased moisture availability and altered atmospheric convergence patterns over
land in the USA (Puma and Cook 2010; DeAngelis et al. 2010). The United States
Geological Survey (USGS) records (Kenny et al. 2009) indicate an increase in
irrigation acreage from 35 million acres (1950) to 65 million acres (in 2005)—
enabled through water infrastructure. Similarly, there are about 75,000 artificial
reservoirs built in the USA during the last century with a total capacity almost
equaling one year’s mean runoff (Graf 1999, 2006; GWSP 2008). The cumulative
effect of this extensive impoundment has been to triple the average residence time
of surface water from 0.1 years (in 1900) to 0.3 years in 2000 (Vorosmarty and
Sahagian 2000), an aspect that clearly has not received the attention of the global
change community. Additionally, what do these local perturbations to extremes
mean for engineers who design and operate infrastructure?
The research findings summarized above clearly exemplify infrastructure-
sensitive impacts of landscape change on extreme weather via land-atmosphere
feedbacks. A more relevant question for the engineering community now is whether
the sensitivity (i.e., the local perturbations or ‘delta x’ in Fig. 1.2) observed in the
landscape’s impact on extremes and whether the associated uncertainty is within the
margins of safety practiced in the conservative engineering design of very large and
high hazard infrastructure.
Definition of Water Infrastructure Resilience
It is important, given the mounting body of research, to propose a definition for

‘Infrastructure Resilience’ (IR) at the intersection of weather and climate for the
engineering community. The definition proposed here is as follows:
A Weather-Climate Resilient Water Infrastructure is defined as an infrastructure that can to
a degree anticipate or adapt and recover from external disruptions due to severe weather and
climate and carry on providing the essential services the infrastructure is designed for with
managed interruption to non-essential services, while balancing tradeoffs among social
(e.g., security), environmental, and economic factors.
The term ‘anticipate’ in the above definition requires elaboration as it may

appear counterintuitive to the engineering community. With the complex
land-atmosphere modeling capability that is now available, it is now possible to
model the future impact of landscape change on extreme weather likely to be
triggered by an infrastructure change. For example, the proposed Grand
Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, that is expected to be completed in
2020, will irrigate vast areas of land for agricultural production. Clearly, the
expected impact of this irrigation on the local-regional climate can be modeled to
consider whether the anticipated local perturbations to extreme weather (during
post-dam phase) need to be explicitly addressed in infrastructure design as the dam
is being built and later in operations. Such an exercise is akin to a ‘life cycle’
assessment and, if performed, may make the infrastructure ‘anticipate’ better the
possible future changes to extreme weather.
Herein, a point to keep in mind is the trade-off between the three bottom lines
that are currently practiced for sustainability—social, environmental, and economic
factors. In the USA, the ongoing failure to adequately address the state of the
nation’s existing infrastructure makes infrastructure resilience all the more critical
for the engineering community. For example, between 1889 and 2006, a total of
1133 US dams were overtopped, according to a database maintained by Stanford
University’s National Performance of Dams Program. Of the structures that were
overtopped, 625 dams, or roughly 55 percent, experienced a hydrologic perfor-
mance failure triggered by extreme weather events that the dam spillways or
downstream levees could not handle. A challenge now is to find smart ways to
address the trillions of dollar needed to rehabilitate infrastructure across the nation.
One smart, cost-effective approach entails understanding the future resilience of
infrastructure and developing procedures for adapting infrastructure so as to man-
age expected risks. In other words, the traditional notion of demolishing existing
infrastructure and rebuilding it as necessary is not an option. For example, this
approach relies on uninterrupted economic growth and abundant resources, an
outcome that cannot always be counted on. Meanwhile, cement production’s global
contribution to greenhouse gas emissions cannot be ignored.
While making the present infrastructure stronger and bigger may be appropriate
in some cases, there will be situations where it may mean abandoning existing
solutions and considering others that are less expensive with similar results.
Infrastructure resilience must weigh affordability in selecting infrastructure solu-

tions against structural resilience. It may be that in order to build infrastructure that
is financially feasible and create neighborhoods that are affordable, engineers may
have to design infrastructure that can fail safely rather than to expend a greater
amount of funds to withstand the changing patterns of extreme weather. Engineers
may also find that ‘natural’ solutions are more affordable over solutions that
demand excessive construction interventions, for instance by exploring natural
water storage systems over manmade reservoirs, etc.
Key Landscape Drivers of Importance
It is worthwhile at this stage to itemize the various landscape drivers referred to

earlier that have implications for infrastructure resilience. The list provided below is
by no means exhaustive but highlights the landscape changes most commonly
known to impact extreme weather and climate.
(1) Irrigation and crop production resulting in altered surface temperature and
humidity, moisture flux, and precipitation patterns.
(2) Urbanization and urban heat islands (concretization, upward expansion, and
densification leading to change in albedo, turbulence, and convergence pat-
terns) resulting in precipitation anomalies over and downwind regions of cities.
(3) Urban Archipelago (note—this is a newer concept that has emerged from the
concept of large cities joining through corridors to alter the regional dynamics
of extreme weather and climate).
(4) Deforestation and forest fire impacts (which also impact soil erosion, land-
slides, and infiltration rates).
(5) Afforestation resulting in altered infiltration and moisture fluxes.
(6) Overgrazing and desertification resulting in drought and altered local climate.
(7) Dryland farming.
(8) Industrialization (aerosols/air quality impacting cloud condensation nuclei)
resulting often in altered precipitation rates and the ability of clouds to
precipitate.
(9) Reservoir creation (upstream of dams) resulting in lake effect rain, snow and
fog, and altered evaporation and precipitation rates in adjacent lands.
(10) Wetland shrinkage (downstream or upstream of dams; tragedy of commons or
urban encroachment).
(11) Emissions (carbon dioxide, nitrogen deposition impacts water quality for
water infrastructure systems).
As noted earlier, the above landscape drivers are compounded by the hemi-
spheric or planetary forcings of climate and weather. At this stage, it appears that
much less is known about the compounding factors due to the historical focus
mostly on global atmospheric composition changes and the effect on the global
average temperatures. The list below itemizes a few potentially compounding

factors that the engineering community would benefit from knowing, particularly
for water management.
(1) Salinity of stream flow reaching the ocean. Due to increasing withdrawal,
diversion, and redistribution of water in infrastructure systems from the natural
pathways, freshwater flux to the ocean is likely to become increasingly saline.
This trend can have significant impact on ocean circulation which in turn
impacts climate.
(2) Location/terrain (Woldemichael et al. 2014; Kunstmann and Knoche 2011;
Mahmood et al. 2010).
(3) Large-scale regulation, inter-basin transfers and redistribution (replumbing) of
watersheds through inter-connected water infrastructure systems (e.g., this topic
is recently coined as ‘hydromorphology’ by Vogel 2011).
(4) Season/climate type (Mahmood et al. 2010; Pielke et al. 2011).
(5) Synoptic-scale moisture convergence pattern (e.g., the Asian Monsoon has
been reported to mask any local-to-regional-scale impact of Three Gorges Dam
on heavy precipitation patterns—see Zhao and Shepherd 2011).
Fig. 1.4 Schematic of landscape change drivers on extreme weather and climate and their
compounding effect in the context of societal feedbacks and services
(6) Dew point temperature trends (e.g., a study by Robinson (2000) indicate
average dew point has risen 1 degree over the last 40 years in most parts of the
USA) and some, or even all of this, could be due to landscape conversion (e.g.,
see Fall et al. 2009).
(7) The biogeochemical effects of added CO2 (as well as its radiative forcing) and
nitrogen deposition (Galloway et al. 2004).
To put the landscape drivers and their potential compounding effect in the
context of infrastructure resilience, societal feedbacks, and essential services, the
TC proposes the following schematic (Fig. 1.4) as a platform for considering the
‘additional calculations’ for the engineering community.
Integrating Landscape Change in Current

Engineering Practice
The engineering profession can still benefit from a few suggestions on how the
‘additional calculations’ from landscape drivers might be addressed in current
engineering practice for improving infrastructure resilience.
The first suggestion pertains to an extensive use of historical observations on
weather events and extreme climate spanning the pre- and post-construction phase of
large water infrastructure projects. In the developed world such as the USA and
Europe, such data is available. Therefore, engineers are uniquely positioned to perform
data-based observational studies (or hypothesis testing) of the statistical difference in
extreme weather and climate processes due to infrastructure-triggered changes in
landscape. Examples of such observational studies may be found for the case of large
dams of the world in Hossain (2010) and Hossain et al. (2010). Degu et al. (2011) and
Degu and Hossain (2012) provide an observational study of 92 large dams in the USA
by observing the statistical difference in atmospheric proxies for heavy storms (e.g.,
Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE), precipitation intensity and frequency
downwind and upwind of reservoirs). Pizarro et al. (2012) reported that the inland
water bodies of Chile may have intensified precipitation at higher elevations. For
sedimentation effects, Graf et al. (2010) provide a comprehensive synopsis of how the
large dams in the Western United States have lost storage.
The use of satellite remote sensing appears to have considerable potential in
regions lacking in situ measurements as demonstrated by a recent study by Taylor
(2010) over the Niger Delta. Although not directly related to infrastructure issues,
Taylor (2010) reported that the 24 years of cloud imagery from satellites indicates
the favoring of convection when the inner delta is inundated (which has implica-
tions to regional water supply and upstream dam operations for the riparian nations
of Senegal, Nigeria, and Mali). It should be noted that most current methods today
focus on using historical data to define design criteria. The focus on trend detection
or discrete shifts is not new but needs more attention by the engineering
community.
The next suggestion for the engineering community is to explicitly embrace

high-resolution numerical models that can model land-atmosphere processes and
feedbacks due to landscape changes down to the mesoscale (*500 m, hourly).
Models widely used today such as the Weather Research and Forecasting
(WRF) model and the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS; Pielke
1992) are some examples that have seen use in this regard. For example, Georgescu
et al. (2014) have looked into the effect of albedo changes (through artificial
whitening of the urban canopy) on the heat signature in major cities of the USA
using WRF. Burian (2006) reported on how urbanization impacts of rainfall can
impact a city’s storm drainage infrastructure. Kunstmann and Knoche (2011)
applied a numerical model to track the precipitation recycling effects for Lake Volta
Dam in Ghana. A series of studies reported in Woldemichael et al. (2012, 2014),
Ohara et al. (2011), Tan (2010), and Yigzaw et al. (2012, 2013) provide examples
on the use of atmospheric models for estimation of PMP and a hydrologic model
(Variable Infiltration Capacity—VIC; Liang et al. 1994) for deriving the conse-
quential PMFs for modeling the resilience of large dams in the Western United
States.
Another suggestion is to partially modify standard engineering practice that
allows a ‘swapping’ with more recent climate-driven data or methods (Rakhecha
et al. 1999). A good example of this is the HMR approach to estimating PMP
(Schreiner and Riedel 1978). The HMR approach is a relatively straightforward and
linear method based on using a historical storm and maximizing it according to the
ratio of historical maximum precipitable water to the storm precipitable water
(Rakhecha and Singh 2009). The engineering assumptions behind this HMR
approach are: (1) the precipitation is linearly related to the precipitable water;
(2) the precipitation efficiency of the storm does not change as the moisture
available to the storm increases; and (3) terrain modulates the distribution of the
precipitation but does not affect the synoptic-scale dynamics of the storm. Abbs
(1999) has investigated the validity of these assumptions and has identified possible
reasons why certain accepted PMP values have been exceeded by recently observed
extreme storm events (such as the 1996 flood in Sydney, Australia). Thus, such
standard procedures can be easily modified where the precipitable water data can be
extracted from more climate-informed approaches (based on newer observations or
models). Stratz and Hossain (2014) have demonstrated this approach in two ways:
(1) using RAMS-derived humidity profiles to ‘update’ HMR PMP, and (2) using
Robinson (2000) data on dew point temperature trends over the last 40 years to
project future HMR PMP. In both cases, considerable changes to PMP were found.
In Chap. 6, we revisit these issues and provide more concrete examples of updating
numeric design parameters for improving resilience.
Currently, engineering risk assessment is already practiced from a multi-criteria
decision-making approach that includes sustainability metrics. This approach,
known as the triple bottom line (TBL), usually includes socioeconomic, social, and
environmental components, and is standardized by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers (USACE) and USBR (Kalyanapu et al. 2011), to identify balanced
alternatives. The TBL is therefore an ideal framework to add the impact of
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III
She has meanwhile probably her hours of amazement at the size of
her windfall; she cannot quite live without wonder at the oddity of
her so “sleeping” partner, the strange creature, by her side, with his
values and his voids, but who is best known to her as having yielded
what she would have clutched to the death. Yet these are mere
mystic, inscrutable possibilities—dreams, for us, of her hushed,
shrouded hours: the face she shows, on all the facts, is that of mere
unwinking tribute to the matter of course. The effect of these high
signs of assurance in her has been—and it is really her master-stroke
—to represent the situation as perfectly normal. Her companion’s
attitude, totally destitute of high signs, does everything it can to
further this feat; so that, as disposed together in the American
picture, they testify, extraordinarily, to the successful rupture of a
universal law, the sight is at first, for observation, most mystifying.
Then the impunity of the whole thing gains upon us; the equilibrium
strikes us, however strangely, as at least provisionally stable; we see
that a society in many respects workable would seem to have been
arrived at, and that we shall in any case have time to study it. The
phenomenon may easily become, for a spectator, the sentence
written largest in the American sky: when he is in search of the
characteristic, what else so plays the part? The woman is two-thirds
of the apparent life—which means that she is absolutely all of the
social; and, as this is nowhere else the case, the occasion is unique
for seeing what such a situation may make of her. The result
elsewhere, in Europe generally, of conditions in which men have
actively participated and to which, throughout, they personally
contribute, she has only the old story to tell, and keeps telling it after
her fashion. The woman produced by a women-made society alone
has obviously quite a new story—to which it is not for a moment to
be gainsaid that the world at large has, for the last thirty years in
particular, found itself lending an attentive, at times even a charmed,
ear. The extent and variety of this attention have been the specious
measure of the personal success of the type in question, and are
always referred to when its value happens to be challenged. “The
American woman?—why, she has beguiled, she has conquered, the
globe: look at her fortune everywhere and fail to accept her if you
can.”
She has been, accordingly, about the globe, beyond all doubt, a
huge success of curiosity; she has at her best—and far beyond any
consciousness and intention of her own, lively as these for the most
part usually are—infinitely amused the nations. It has been found
among them that, for more reasons than we can now go into, her
manner of embodying and representing her sex has fairly made of
her a new human convenience, not unlike fifty of the others, of a
slightly different order, the ingenious mechanical appliances, stoves,
refrigerators, sewing-machines, type-writers, cash-registers, that
have done so much, in the household and the place of business, for
the American name. By which I am of course far from meaning that
the revelation has been of her utility as a domestic drudge; it has
been much rather in the fact that the advantages attached to her
being a woman at all have been so happily combined with the
absence of the drawbacks, for persons intimately dealing with her,
traditionally suggested by that condition. The corresponding
advantages, in the light of almost any old order, have always seemed
inevitably paid for by the drawbacks; but here, unmistakably, was a
case in which—as at first appeared, certainly—they were to be
enjoyed very nearly for nothing. What it came to, evidently, was that
she had been grown in an air in which a hundred of the “European”
complications and dangers didn’t exist, and in which also she had
had to take upon herself a certain training for freedom. It was not
that she had had, in the vulgar sense, to “look out” for herself,
inasmuch as it was of the very essence of her position not to be
threatened or waylaid; but that she could develop her audacity on the
basis of her security, just as she could develop her “powers” in a
medium from which criticism was consistently absent. Thus she
arrived, full-blown, on the general scene, the least criticized object, in
proportion to her importance, that had ever adorned it. It would take
long to say why her situation, under this retrospect, may affect the
inner fibre of the critic himself as one of the most touching on
record; he may merely note his perception that she was to have been
after all but the sport of fate. For why need she originally, he
wonders, have embraced so confidently, so gleefully, yet so
unguardedly, the terms offered her to an end practically so
perfidious? Why need she, unless in the interest of her eventual
discipline, have turned away with so light a heart after watching the
Man, the deep American man, retire into his tent and let down the
flap? She had her “paper” from him, their agreement signed and
sealed; but would she not, in some other air and under some other
sky, have been visited by a saving instinct? Would she not have said
“No, this is too unnatural; there must be a trap in it somewhere—it’s
addressed really, in the long run, to making a fool of me?” It is
impossible, of course, to tell; and her case, as it stands for us, at any
rate, is that she showed no doubts. It is not on the American scene
and in the presence of mere American phenomena that she is even
yet to be observed as showing them; but does not my digression find
itself meanwhile justified by the almost clear certainty that the first
symptoms of the revulsion—of the convulsion, I am tempted to say—
must break out in Washington?
For here—and it is what I have been so long in coming to—here
alone in the American world, do we catch the other sex not observing
the agreement. I have described this anomaly, at Washington, as that
of Man’s socially “existing”; since we have seen that his fidelity to his
compact throughout the country in general has involved his not
doing so. What has happened, obviously, has been that his reasons,
at a stroke, have dropped, and that he finds himself, without them, a
different creature. He has discovered that he can exist in other
connections than that of the Market, and that all he has therefore to
settle is the question of whether he may. The most delicate interest of
Washington is the fact that it is quite practically being settled there—
in the practical way which is yet also the dramatic. Solvitur
ambulando; it is being settled—that is the charm—as it goes, settled
without discussion. It would be awkward and gross to say that Man
has dealt any conscious blow at the monopoly of his companion, or
that her prestige, as mistress of the situation, has suffered in any
manner a noted abatement. Yet none the less, as he has there, in a
degree, socially found himself and, allured by the new sense, is
evidently destined to seek much further still, the sensible effect, the
change of impression on one’s coming from other places, is of the
most marked. Man is solidly, vividly present, and the presence of
Woman has consequently, for the proposed intensity, to reckon with
it. The omens on behalf of the former appearance are just now
strikingly enhanced, as happens, by the accident of the rare quality,
as it were, of the particular male presence supremely presiding there;
and it would certainly be strange that this idea of the re-committal to
masculine hands of some share at least in the interests of civilization,
some part of the social property and social office, should not, from so
high an example, have received a new impulse and a new
consecration. Easily enough, if we had space here to consider it,
might come up the whole picture of the new indications thus
afforded, the question of the degree in which a sex capable, in the
American air, of having so despoiled itself may really be capable of
retracing its steps and repairing its mistake. It would appear
inevitable to ask whether such a mistake on such a scale can prove
effectively reparable—whether ground so lost can be effectively
recovered. Has not the American woman, with such a start, gained
such an irreducible advance, on the whole high plane of the
amenities, that her companion will never catch up with her? This last
is an inquiry that I must, alas, brush aside, though feeling it, as I
have already noted, the most oddly interesting that the American
spectacle proposes to us; only saying, provisionally, that the aspect of
manners through the nation at large offers no warrant whatever for
any prompt “No” to it.
It is not, however, of the nation at large I here speak; the case is of
the extremely small, though important and significant, fraction of the
whole represented by the Washington group—which thus shows us
the Expropriated Half in the very act of itself pondering that issue. Is
the man “up to it,” up to the major heritage, the man who could,
originally, so inconceivably, and for a mere mess of pottage if there
ever was one, let it go? “Are we up to it, really, at this time of day,
and what on earth will awfully become of us if the question, once put
to the test, shall have to be decided against us?” I think it not merely
fanciful to say that some dim, distressful interrogative sound of that
sort frequently reached, in the Washington air, the restless analyst—
though not to any quickening of his own fear. With a perfect
consciousness that it was still early to say, that the data are as yet
insufficient and that the missing quantity must absolutely be found
before it can be weighed and valued, he was none the less struck with
the felicity of many symptoms and would fairly have been able to
believe at moments that the character hitherto so effaced has but to
show the confidence of taking itself for granted. That act of itself
reveals, restores, reinstates and completes this character. Is it not,
for that matter, essentially implied in our recognition of the place as
the City of Conversation? The victim of effacement, the outcast at the
door, has, all the while we have been talking of him, talked himself
back; and if anything could add to this happy portent it would be
another that had scarcely less bearing. Nowhere more than in
Washington, positively, were the women to have struck me as
naturally and harmoniously in the social picture—as happily,
soothingly, proportionately, and no more than proportionately,
participant and ministrant. Hence the irresistible conclusion that
with the way really shown them they would only ask to take it; the
way being their assent to the truth that the abdication of the Man
proves ever (after the first flush of their triumph) as bad really for
their function as for his. Hence, in fine, the appearance that, with the
proportions re-established, they will come to recognize their past
world as a fools’ paradise, and their present, and still more their
future, as much more made to endure. They could not, one reasoned,
have been, in general, so perfectly agreeable unless they had been
pleased, and they could not have been pleased without the prospect
of gaining, by the readjusted relation, more, on the whole, than they
were to lose; without the prospect even again perhaps of truly and
insidiously gaining more than the other beneficiary. That would be, I
think, the feminine conception of a readministered justice.
Washington, at such a rate, in any case, might become to them as
good as “Europe,” and a Europe of their own would obviously be
better than a Europe of other people’s. There are, after all, other
women on the other continents.
IV
One might have been sure in advance that the character of a
democracy would nowhere more sharply mark itself than in the
democratic substitute for a court city, and Washington is cast in the
mould that expresses most the absence of salient social landmarks
and constituted features. Here it is that conversation, as the only
invoked presence, betrays a little its inadequacy to the furnishing
forth, all by itself, of an outward view. It tells us it must be there,
since in all the wide empty vistas nothing else is, and the general
elimination can but have left it. A pleading, touching effect, indeed,
lurks in this sense of it as seated, at receipt of custom, by any decent
door of any decent domicile and watching the vacancy for reminder
and appeal. It is left to conversation alone to people the scene with
accents; putting aside two or three objects to be specified, there is
never an accent in it, up and down, far and wide, save such as fall
rather on the ear of the mind: those projected by the social spirit
starved for the sense of an occasional emphasis. The White House is
an accent—one of the lightest, sharpest possible; and the Capitol, of
course, immensely, another; though the latter falls on the exclusively
political page, as to which I have been waiting to say a word. It
should meanwhile be mentioned that we are promised these
enhancements, these illustrations, of the great general text, on the
most magnificent scale; a splendid projected and announced
Washington of the future, with approaches even now grandly
outlined and massively marked; in face of which one should perhaps
confess to the futility of any current estimate. If I speak thus of the
Capitol, however, let me not merely brush past the White House to
get to it—any more than feel free to pass into it without some
preliminary stare at that wondrous Library of Congress which glitters
in fresh and almost unmannerly emulation, almost frivolous
irrelevance of form, in the neighbourhood of the greater building.
About the ingenuities and splendours of this last costly structure, a
riot of rare material and rich ornament, there would doubtless be
much to say—did not one everywhere, on all such ground, meet the
open eye of criticism simply to establish with it a private intelligence,
simply to respond to it by a deprecating wink. The guardian of that
altar, I think, is but too willing, on such a hint, to let one pass
without the sacrifice.
It is a case again here, as on fifty other occasions, of the tribute
instantly paid by the revisiting spirit; but paid, all without question,
to the general kind of presence for which the noisy air, over the land,
feels so sensibly an inward ache—the presence that corresponds
there, no matter how loosely, to that of the housing and harbouring
European Church in the ages of great disorder. The Universities and
the greater Libraries (the smaller, for a hundred good democratic
reasons, are another question), repeat, in their manner, to the
imagination, East and West, the note of the old thick-walled
convents and quiet cloisters: they are large and charitable, they are
sturdy, often proud and often rich, and they have the incalculable
value that they represent the only intermission to inordinate
rapacious traffic that the scene offers to view. With this suggestion of
sacred ground they play even upon the most restless of analysts as
they will, making him face about, with ecstasy, any way they seem to
point; so that he feels it his business much less to count over their
shortcomings than to proclaim them places of enchantment. They
are better at their worst than anything else at its best, and the
comparatively sweet sounds that stir their theoretic stillness are for
him as echoes of the lyre of Apollo. The Congressional Library is
magnificent, and would become thus a supreme sanctuary even were
it ten times more so: there would seem to be nothing then but to
pronounce it a delight and have done with it—or let the appalled
imagination, in other words, slink into it and stay there. But here is
pressed precisely, with particular force, the spring of the question
that takes but a touch to sound: is the case of this remarkable
creation, by exception, a case in which the violent waving of the
pecuniary wand has incontinently produced interest? The answer
can only be, I feel, a shy assent—though shy indeed only till the logic
of the matter is apparent. This logic is that, though money alone can
gather in on such a scale the treasures of knowledge, these treasures,
in the form of books and documents, themselves organize and
furnish their world. They appoint and settle the proportions, they
thicken the air, they people the space, they create and consecrate all
their relations, and no one shall say that, where they scatter life,
which they themselves in fact are, history does not promptly attend.
Emphatically yes, therefore, the great domed and tiered, galleried
and statued central hall of the Congressional, the last word of current
constructional science and artistic resource, already crowns itself
with that grace.
The graceful thing in Washington beyond any other, none the less,
is the so happily placed and featured White House, the late excellent
extensions and embellishments of which have of course represented
expenditure—but only of the refined sort imposed by some mature
portionless gentlewoman on relatives who have accepted the
principle of making her, at a time of life, more honourably
comfortable. The whole ample precinct and margin formed by the
virtual continuity of its grounds with those expanses in which the
effect of the fine Washington Obelisk rather spends or wastes itself
(not a little as if some loud monosyllable had been uttered, in a
preoccupied company, without a due production of sympathy or
sense)—the fortunate isolation of the White House, I say, intensifies
its power to appeal to that musing and mooning visitor whose
perceptions alone, in all the conditions, I hold worthy of account.
Hereabouts, beyond doubt, history had from of old seemed to me
insistently seated, and I remember a short spring-time of years ago
when Lafayette Square itself, contiguous to the Executive Mansion,
could create a rich sense of the past by the use of scarce other
witchcraft than its command of that pleasant perspective and its
possession of the most prodigious of all Presidential effigies, Andrew
Jackson, as archaic as a Ninevite king, prancing and rocking through
the ages. If that atmosphere, moreover, in the fragrance of the
Washington April, was even a quarter of a century since as a liquor of
bitter-sweet taste, overflowing its cup, what was the ineffable
mixture now, with all the elements further distilled, all the life
further sacrificed, to make it potent? One circled about the place as
for meeting the ghosts, and one paused, under the same impulse,
before the high palings of the White House drive, as if wondering at
haunted ground. There the ghosts stood in their public array,
spectral enough and clarified; yet scarce making it easier to “place”
the strange, incongruous blood-drops, as one looked through the
rails, on that revised and freshened page. But one fortunately has
one’s choice, in all these connections, as one turns away; the mixture,
as I have called it, is really here so fine. General Jackson, in the
centre of the Square, still rocks his hobby and the earth; but the fruit
of the interval, to my actual eyes, hangs nowhere brighter than in the
brilliant memorials lately erected to Lafayette and to Rochambeau.
Artful, genial, expressive, the tribute of French talent, these happy
images supply, on the spot, the note without which even the most
fantasticating sense of our national past would feel itself rub forever
against mere brown homespun. Everything else gives way, for me, I
confess, as I again stand before them; everything, whether as historic
fact, or present agrément, or future possibility, yields to this one
high luxury of our old friendship with France.
The “artistic” Federal city already announced spreads itself then
before us, in plans elaborated even to the finer details, a city of
palaces and monuments and gardens, symmetries and circles and far
radiations, with the big Potomac for water-power and water-effect
and the recurrent Maryland spring, so prompt and so full-handed,
for a perpetual benediction. This imagery has, above all, the value,
for the considering mind, that it presents itself as under the wide-
spread wings of the general Government, which fairly make it figure
to the rapt vision as the object caught up in eagle claws and lifted
into fields of air that even the high brows of the municipal boss fail to
sweep. The wide-spread wings affect us, in the prospect, as great fans
that, by their mere tremor, will blow the work, at all steps and stages,
clean and clear, disinfect it quite ideally of any germ of the job, and
prepare thereby for the American voter, on the spot and in the pride
of possession, quite a new kind of civic consciousness. The scheme
looms largest, surely, as a demonstration of the possibilities of that
service to him, and nothing about it will be more interesting than to
measure—though this may take time—the nature and degree of his
alleviation. Will the new pride I speak of sufficiently inflame him?
Will the taste of the new consciousness, finding him so fresh to it,
prove the right medicine? One can only regret that we must still
rather indefinitely wait to see—and regret it all the more that there is
always, in America, yet another lively source of interest involved in
the execution of such designs, and closely involved just in proportion
as the high intention, the formal majesty, of the thing seems assured.
It comes back to what we constantly feel, throughout the country, to
what the American scene everywhere depends on for half its appeal
or its effect; to the fact that the social conditions, the material,
pressing and pervasive, make the particular experiment or
demonstration, whatever it may pretend to, practically a new and
incalculable thing. This general Americanism is often the one tag of
character attaching to the case after every other appears to have
abandoned it. The thing is happening, or will have to happen, in the
American way—that American way which is more different from all
other native ways, taking country with country, than any of these
latter are different from each other; and the question is of how, each
time, the American way will see it through.
The element of suspense—beguilement, ever, of the sincere
observer—is provided for by the fact that, though this American way
never fails to come up, he has to recognize as by no means equally
true that it never fails to succeed. It is inveterately applied, but with
consequences bewilderingly various; which means, however, for our
present moral, but that the certainty of the determined American
effect is an element to attend quite especially such a case as the
employment of the arts of design, on an unprecedented scale, for
public uses, the adoption on this scale of the whole æsthetic law.
Encountered in America, phenomena of this order strike us mostly
as occurring in the historic void, as having to present themselves in
the hard light of that desert, and as needing to extort from it, so far
as they can, something of the shading of their interest. Encountered
in older countries, they show, on the contrary, as taking up the
references, as consenting perforce to the relations, of which the air is
already full, and as having thereby much rather to get themselves
expressive by charm than to get themselves expressive by weight.
The danger “in Europe” is of their having too many things to say, and
too many others to distinguish these from; the danger in the States is
of their not having things enough—with enough tone and resonance
furthermore to give them. What therefore will the multitudinous and
elaborate forms of the Washington to come have to “say,” and what,
above all, besides gold and silver, stone and marble and trees and
flowers, will they be able to say it with? That is one of the questions
in the mere phrasing of which the restless analyst finds a thrill. There
is a thing called interest that has to be produced for him—positively
as if he were a rabid usurer with a clutch of his imperilled bond. He
has seen again and again how the most expensive effort often fails to
lead up to interest, and he has seen how it may bloom in soil of no
more worth than so many layers of dust and ashes. He has learnt in
fact—he learns greatly in America—to mistrust any plea for it directly
made by money, which operates too often as the great puffing motor-
car framed for whirling him, in his dismay, quite away from it. And
he has inevitably noted, at the same time, from how comparatively
few other sources this rewarding dividend on his invested attention
may be drawn. He thinks of these sources as few, that is, because he
sees the same ones, which are the references by which interest is fed,
used again and again, with a desperate economy; sees the same ones,
even as the human heroes, celebrities, extemporized lions or
scapegoats, required social and educational figure-heads and
“values,” having to serve in all the connections and adorn all the
tales. That is one of the liveliest of his American impressions. He has
at moments his sense that, in presence of such vast populations and
instilled, emulous demands, there is not, outside the mere economic,
enough native history, recorded or current, to go round.
V
It seemed to me on the spot, moreover, that such reflections were
rather more than less pertinent in face of the fact that I was again to
find the Capitol, whenever I approached, and above all whenever I
entered it, a vast and many-voiced creation. The thing depends of
course somewhat on the visitor, who will be the more responsive, I
think, the further back into the “origins” of the whole American
spectacle his personal vision shall carry him; but this hugest, as I
suppose it, of all the homes of debate only asks to put forth, on
opportunity, an incongruous, a various, an inexhaustible charm. I
may as well say at once that I had found myself from the first adoring
the Capitol, though I may not pretend here to dot all the i’s of all my
reasons—since some of these might appear below the dignity of the
subject and others alien to its simplicity. The ark of the American
covenant may strike one thus, at any rate, as a compendium of all the
national ideals, a museum, crammed full, even to overflowing, of all
the national terms and standards, weights and measures and
emblems of greatness and glory, and indeed as a builded record of
half the collective vibrations of a people; their conscious spirit, their
public faith, their bewildered taste, their ceaseless curiosity, their
arduous and interrupted education. Such were to my vision at least
some of its aspects, but the place had a hundred sides, and if I had
had time to look for others still I felt I should have found them. What
it comes to—whereby the “pull,” in America, is of the greatest—is that
association really reigns there, and in the richest, and even again and
again in the drollest, forms; it is thick and vivid and almost gross, it
assaults the wondering mind. The labyrinthine pile becomes thus
inordinately amusing—taking the term in its finer modern sense.
The analogy may seem forced, but it affected me as playing in
Washington life very much the part that St. Peter’s, of old, had
seemed to me to play in Roman: it offered afternoon entertainment,
at the end of a longish walk, to any spirit in the humour for the
uplifted and flattered vision—and this without suggesting that the
sublimities in the two cases, even as measured by the profanest
mind, tend at all to be equal. The Washington dome is indeed
capable, in the Washington air, of admirable, of sublime, effects; and
there are cases in which, seen at a distance above its yellow Potomac,
it varies but by a shade from the sense—yes, absolutely the divine
campagna-sense—of St. Peter’s and the like-coloured Tiber.
But the question is positively of the impressiveness of the great
terraced Capitol hill, with its stages and slopes, staircases and
fountains, its general presentation of its charge. And if the whole
mass and prospect “amuse,” as I say, from the moment they are
embraced, the visitor curious of the democratic assimilation of the
greater dignities and majesties will least miss the general logic. That
is the light in which the whole thing is supremely interesting; the
light of the fact, illustrated at every turn, that the populations
maintaining it deal with it so directly and intimately, so sociably and
humorously. We promptly take in that, if ever we are to commune in
a concentrated way with the sovereign people, and see their exercised
power raise a side-wind of irony for forms and arrangements other
than theirs, the occasion here will amply serve. Indubitably,
moreover, at a hundred points, the irony operates, and all the more
markedly under such possible interference; the interference of the
monumental spittoons, that of the immense amount of vulgar, of
barbaric, decoration, that of the terrible artistic tributes from, and
scarce less to, the different States—the unassorted marble mannikins
in particular, each a portrayal by one of the commonwealths of her
highest worthy, which make the great Rotunda, the intended
Valhalla, resemble a stonecutter’s collection of priced sorts and sizes.
Discretion exists, throughout, only as a flower of the very first or of
these very latest years; the large middle time, corresponding, and
even that unequally, with the English Victorian, of sinister memory,
was unacquainted with the name, and waits there now, in its fruits,
but for a huge sacrificial fire, some far-flaring act-of-faith of the
future: a tribute to the æsthetic law which one already feels stirring
the air, so that it may arrive, I think, with an unexampled stride.
Nothing will have been more interesting, surely, than so public a
wiping-over of the æsthetic slate, with all the involved collective
compunctions and repudiations, the general exhibition of a colossal
conscience, a conscience proportionate to the size and wealth of the
country. To such grand gestures does the American scene lend itself!
The elements in question are meanwhile there, in any case, just as
the sovereign people are there, “going over” their property; but we
are aware none the less of impressions—that of the ponderous proud
Senate, for instance, so sensibly massive; that of the Supreme Court,
so simply, one almost says so chastely, yet, while it breathes
supremacy, so elegantly, so all intellectually, in session—under which
the view, taking one extravagance with another, recurs rather
ruefully to glimpses elsewhere caught, glimpses of authority
emblazoned, bewigged, bemantled, bemarshalled, in almost direct
defeat of its intention of gravity. For the reinstated absentee, in these
presences, the mere recovery of native privilege was at all events a
balm—after too many challenged appeals and abused patiences, too
many hushed circuitous creepings, among the downtrodden, in other
and more bristling halls of state. The sense of a certain large, final
benignity in the Capitol comes then, I think, from this impression
that the national relation to it is that of a huge flourishing Family to
the place of business, the estate-office, where, in a myriad open
ledgers, which offer no obscurity to the hereditary head for figures,
the account of their colossal revenue is kept. They meet there in safe
sociability, as all equally initiated and interested—not as in a temple
or a citadel, but by the warm domestic hearth of Columbia herself; a
motherly, chatty, clear-spectacled Columbia, who reads all the
newspapers, knows, to the last man, every one of her sons by name,
and, to the last boy, even her grandsons, and is fenced off, at the
worst, but by concentric circles of rocking-chairs. It is impossible, as
I say, not to be fondly conscious of her welcome—unless again, and
yet again, I read into the general air, confusedly, too much of the
happy accident of the basis of my introduction. But if my sensibility
responds with intensity to this, so much the better; for what were
such felt personal aids and influences, after all, but cases and
examples, embodied expressions of character, type, distinction,
products of the working of the whole thing?—specimens, indeed,
highly concentrated and refined, and made thereby, I admit, more
charming and insidious.
It must also be admitted that to exchange the inner aspects of the
vast monument for the outer is to be reminded with some sharpness
of a Washington in which half the sides that have held our attention
drop, as if rather abashed, out of sight. Not its pleasant brightness as
of a winter watering-place, not its connections, however indirect,
with the older, but those with the newer, the newest, civilization,
seem matter of recognition for its various marble fronts; it rakes the
prospect, it rakes the continent, to a much more sweeping purpose,
and is visibly concerned but in immeasurable schemes of which it
can consciously remain the centre. Here, in the vast spaces—mere
empty light and air, though such pleasant air and such pretty light as
yet—the great Federal future seems, under vague bright forms, to
hover and to stalk, making the horizon recede to take it in, making
the terraces too, below the long colonnades, the admirable
standpoints, the sheltering porches, of political philosophy. The
comparatively new wings of the building filled me, whenever I
walked here, with thanksgiving for their large and perfect elegance:
so, in Paris, might the wide mated fronts that are of such a noble
effect on either side of the Rue Royale shine in multiplied majesty
and recovered youth over an infinite Place de la Concorde. These
parts of the Capitol, on their Acropolis height, are ideally constructed
for “raking,” and for this suggestion of their dominating the
American scene in playhouse gallery fashion. You are somehow
possessed of it all while you tread them—their marble embrace
appears so the complement of the vast democratic lap. Though I had
them in general, for contemplation, quite to myself, I met one
morning a trio of Indian braves, braves dispossessed of forest and
prairie, but as free of the builded labyrinth as they had ever been of
these; also arrayed in neat pot-hats, shoddy suits and light overcoats,
with their pockets, I am sure, full of photographs and cigarettes:
circumstances all that quickened their resemblance, on the much
bigger scale, to Japanese celebrities, or to specimens, on show, of
what the Government can do with people with whom it is supposed
able to do nothing. They seemed just then and there, for a mind fed
betimes on the Leatherstocking Tales, to project as in a flash an
image in itself immense, but foreshortened and simplified—reducing
to a single smooth stride the bloody footsteps of time. One rubbed
one’s eyes, but there, at its highest polish, shining in the beautiful
day, was the brazen face of history, and there, all about one,
immaculate, the printless pavements of the State.
XII
RICHMOND
I
It was, toward the end of the winter, fairly romantic to feel one’s
self “going South”—in verification of the pleasant probability that,
since one’s mild adventure had appeared beforehand, and as a whole,
to promise that complexion, there would now be aspects and
occasions more particularly and deeply dyed with it. The inevitability
of his being romantically affected—being so more often than not—
had been taken for granted by the restless analyst from the first; his
feeling that he might count upon it having indeed, in respect to his
visit, the force of a strong appeal. The case had come to strike him as
perfectly clear—the case for the singular history, the odd evolution of
this confidence, which might appear superficially to take some
explaining. It was “Europe” that had, in very ancient days, held out to
the yearning young American some likelihood of impressions more
numerous and various and of a higher intensity than those he might
gather on the native scene; and it was doubtless in conformity with
some such desire more finely and more frequently to vibrate that he
had originally begun to consult the European oracle. This had led, in
the event, to his settling to live for long years in the very precincts, as
it were, of the temple; so that the voice of the divinity was finally to
become, in his ears, of all sounds the most familiar. It was quite to
lose its primal note of mystery, to cease little by little to be strange,
impressive and august—in the degree, at any rate, in which it had
once enjoyed that character. The consultation of the oracle, in a
word, the invocation of the possible thrill, was gradually to feel its
romantic essence enfeebled, shrunken and spent. The European
complexity, working clearer to one’s vision, had grown usual and
calculable—presenting itself, to the discouragement of wasteful
emotion and of “intensity” in general, as the very stuff, the common
texture, of the real world. Romance and mystery—in other words the
amusement of interest—would have therefore at last to provide for
themselves elsewhere; and what curiously befell, in time, was that
the native, the forsaken scene, now passing, as continual rumour had
it, through a thousand stages and changes, and offering a perfect
iridescence of fresh aspects, seemed more and more to appeal to the
faculty of wonder. It was American civilization that had begun to
spread itself thick and pile itself high, in short, in proportion as the
other, the foreign exhibition had taken to writing itself plain; and to a
world so amended and enriched, accordingly, the expatriated
observer, with his relaxed curiosity reviving and his limp imagination
once more on the stretch, couldn’t fail again to address himself.
Nothing could be of a simpler and straighter logic: Europe had been
romantic years before, because she was different from America;
wherefore America would now be romantic because she was different
from Europe. It was for this small syllogism then to meet, practically,
the test of one’s repatriation; and as the palpitating pilgrim
disembarked, in truth, he had felt it, like the rifle of a keen
sportsman, carried across his shoulder and ready for instant use.
What employment it was thus to find, what game it was actually to
bring down, this directed and aimed appetite for sharp impressions,
is a question to which these pages may appear in a manner to testify
—constituting to that extent the “proof” of my fond calculation. It
was in respect to the South, meanwhile, at any rate, that the
calculation had really been fondest—on such a stored, such a waiting
provision of vivid images, mainly beautiful and sad, might one surely
there depend. The sense of these things would represent for the
restless analyst, more than that of any others, intensity of
impression; so that his only prime discomfiture was in his having
had helplessly to see his allowance of time cut short, reduced to the
smallest compass in which the establishment of a relation to any
group of aspects might be held conceivable. This last soreness,
however—and the point is one to be made—was not slow, I noted, to
find itself healingly breathed upon. More promptly in America than
elsewhere does the relation to the group of aspects begin to work—
whatever the group, and I think I may add whatever the relation,
may be. Few elements of the picture are shy or lurking elements—
tangled among others or hidden behind them, packed close by time
and taking time to come out. They stand there in their row like the
letters of an alphabet, and this is why, in spite of the vast surface
exposed, any item, encountered or selected, contributes to the
spelling of the word, becomes on the spot generally informing and
characteristic. The word so recognized stands thus, immediately, for
a multitude of others and constitutes, to expert observation, an all-
sufficient specimen. “Here, evidently, more quickly than in Europe,”
the visitor says to himself, “one knows what there is and what there
isn’t: whence there is the less need, for one’s impression, of a
multiplication of cases.” A single case speaks for many—since it is
again and again, as he catches himself repeating, a question not of
clustered meanings that fall like over-ripe fruit into his lap, but of the
picking out of the few formed features, signs of character mature
enough and firm enough to promise a savour or to suffer handling.
These scant handfuls illustrate and typify, and, luckily, they are (as
the evidence of manners and conditions, over the world, goes)
quickly gathered; so that an impression founded on them is not an
undue simplification. And I make out, I think, the reflection with
which our anxious explorer tacitly concludes. “It’s a bad country to
be stupid in—none on the whole so bad. If one doesn’t know how to
look and to see, one should keep out of it altogether. But if one does,
if one can see straight, one takes in the whole piece at a series of
points that are after all comparatively few. One may neglect, by
interspacing the points, a little of the accessory matter, but one
neglects none of the essential. And if one has not at last learned to
separate with due sharpness, pen in hand, the essential from the
accessory, one has only, at best, to muffle one’s head for shame and
await deserved extinction.”
II
It was in conformity with some such induction as the foregoing
that I had to feel myself, at Richmond, in the midst of abnormal
wintry rigours, take in at every pore a Southern impression; just as it
was also there, before a picture charmless at the best, I seemed to
apprehend, and not redeemed now by mistimed snow and ice, that I
was to recognize how much I had staked on my theory of the latent
poetry of the South. This theory, during a couple of rather dark, vain
days, constituted my one solace or support, and I was most of all
occupied with my sense of the importance of carrying it off again
unimpaired. I remember asking myself at the end of an hour or two
what I had then expected—expected of the interesting Richmond;
and thereupon, whether or no I mustered, on this first challenge, an
adequate answer, trying to supply the original basis of expectation.
By that effort, as happened, my dim perambulation was lighted, and
I hasten to add that I felt the second branch of my question easy
enough to meet. How was the sight of Richmond not to be a potent
idea; how was the place not, presumably, to be interesting, to a
restless analyst who had become conscious of the charge involved in
that title as long ago as at the outbreak of the Civil War, if not even
still more promptly; and to whose young imagination the
Confederate capital had grown lurid, fuliginous, vividly tragic—
especially under the process through which its fate was to close
round it and overwhelm it, invest it with one of the great
reverberating historic names? They hang together on the dreadful
page, the cities of the supreme holocaust, the final massacres, the
blood, the flames, the tears; they are chalked with the sinister red
mark at sight of which the sensitive nerve of association forever
winces. If the mere shadow had that penetrative power, what
affecting virtue might accordingly not reside in the substances, the
place itself, the haunted scene, as one might figure it, of the old, the
vast intensity of drama? One thing at least was certain—that,
however the sense of actual aspects was to disengage itself, I could
not possibly have drawn near with an intelligence more respectfully
and liberally prepared for hospitality to it. So, conformably with all
this, how could it further not strike me, in presence of the presented
appearances, that the needful perceptions were in fact at play?
I recall the shock of that question after a single interrogative stroll,
a mere vague mile of which had thrown me back wondering and a
trifle mystified. One had had brutally to put it to one’s self after a
conscientious stare about: “This then the tragic ghost-haunted city,
this the centre of the vast blood-drenched circle, one of the most
blood-drenched, for miles and miles around, in the dire catalogue
aforesaid?” One had counted on a sort of registered consciousness of
the past, and the truth was that there appeared, for the moment, on
the face of the scene, no discernible consciousness, registered or
unregistered, of anything. Richmond, in a word, looked to me simply
blank and void—whereby it was, precisely, however, that the great
emotion was to come. One could never consent merely to taking it
for that: intolerable the discredit so cast on one’s perceptive
resources. The great modern hotel, superfluously vast, was excellent;
but it enjoyed as a feature, as a “value,” an uncontested priority. It
was a huge well-pitched tent, the latest thing in tents, proclaiming in
the desert the name of a new industry. The desert, I have mentioned,
was more or less muffled in snow—that furthered, I admit, the
blankness; the wind was harsh, the sky sullen, the houses scarce
emphasized at all as houses; the “Southern character,” in fine, was
nowhere. I should doubtless have been embarrassed to say in what
specific items I had imagined it would naturally reside—save in so far
as I had attached some mystic virtue to the very name of Virginia:
this instinctive imputation constituting by itself, for that matter, a
symptom of a certain significance. I watched and waited, giving the
virtue a chance to come out; I wandered far and wide—as far, that is,
as weather and season permitted; they quite forbade, to my regret,
the long drives involved in a visitation of the old battlefields. The
shallow vistas, the loose perspectives, were as sadly simple as the
faces of the blind. Was it practically but a question then, deplorable
thought, of a poor Northern city?—with the bare difference that a
Northern city of such extent would, however stricken, have
succeeded, by some Northern art in pretending to resources. Where,
otherwise, were the “old Southern mansions” on the wide verandahs
and in the rank, sweet gardens of which Northern resources had once
been held so cheap?
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Resilience of Large Water Management

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Water Resilience: Management and Governance in Times of

Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics Fundamentals and

Resilience Response and Risk in Water Systems Shifting

Water Resources Management Innovative and Green Solutions

The Science and Practice of Resilience Igor Linkov

Drought and Water Crises: Integrating Science, Management,

Resilience of Critical Infrastructure Systems-Emerging

European Water Law and Hydropolitics: An Inquiry into the

Resilience of Large Water

With advisory support from The Task Committee

ISBN 978-3-030-26431-4 ISBN 978-3-030-26432-1 (eBook)

providing the engineering community additional “scenarios” (from modern atmo-

Development of the Book

The ASCE Task Committee Members in Advisory Role

The Task Committee members were:

During 2014–2017, the TC met mostly via teleconference meetings or group

Seattle, USA Faisal Hossain

1 Resilience of Water Management Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Fig. 6.1 The overall PMP estimation approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Table 4.1 Binary results indices for evaluation metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Faisal Hossain, Jeffrey Arnold, Dev Niyogi, Roger A. Pielke Sr.,

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1

‘scenarios’ in its decision-making. The engineering community needs to understand

Why Water Management Infrastructure?

Broadening the Focus on Drivers of Change for

Realizing the importance of water management infrastructures, efforts have already

Local-to-Regional Landscape Driver of Extreme Weather

[Adapted from Hossain et al. (2015).]

Engineering Magazine (Dec 2012 issue). These articles encouraged engineers to

Why Is Landscape Change Important?

The interactions between local-to-regional drivers of climate (such as landscape

Deﬁnition of Water Infrastructure Resilience

It is important, given the mounting body of research, to propose a deﬁnition for

The term ‘anticipate’ in the above deﬁnition requires elaboration as it may

Infrastructure resilience must weigh affordability in selecting infrastructure solu-

Key Landscape Drivers of Importance

It is worthwhile at this stage to itemize the various landscape drivers referred to

average temperatures. The list below itemizes a few potentially compounding

Integrating Landscape Change in Current

The next suggestion for the engineering community is to explicitly embrace

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

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