Extreme events in low Tocuyo river basin, Venezuela. In the context of climate change
Hermes de Jesus Carmona Alvarez, Adriana Marquez
Tuesday 30 june 2015
12:48 - 12:51h
at North America (level 0)
Themes: (T) Extreme events, natural variability and climate change, (ST) Hydrological extremes: floods and droughts, Poster pitches
Parallel session: Poster pitches: 5I. Extreme - Flood Drought
This paper provides a characterization of the extreme events in The Tocuyo river basin, Venezuela, which covers an area of 17,676 km2, with a population of over 600,000 people and has an average annual discharge of 28.6 m3/s. It is the only country basin that flows to the Caribbean Sea, having an Andean origin and born in the mountain of Cendé of the Andean foothills to 3652 m, south of Lara state in western Venezuela. Periodically, during the last months of the year corresponding to the rainy season in this basin, heavy precipitation occurs in both states and multiplies the average flow of the river turning into dangerously flooding large areas, affecting everybody and causing serious economic losses, the most serious of these floods occurred recently in December 2010, on the other hand in 2011 and 2012, heavy rain caused flooding of the river. Methodology and results: Analysis of rainfall series observed in 14 stations for the 1950-2008, and other data source from 2000-2008, it shows a decreasing trend in rainfall for different locations as is prognosticated by climate change. Also is demonstrated that the orographic rainfall is not decisive in the formation of precipitation in this basin. However, in floods of 2011 and 2012, the national government approved more than 60 millions of US $, as resources for recovery and environmental sanitation of the east coast of The Falcon state, for flood control works that ranged from the sanitation and rectification of riverbeds, to the environmental recovery of the areas affected by the floods; works of flood protection, retaining walls, drainage and recovery Tocuyo River, like rivers Tucurere, Dressing up MatÃcora, on the west coast. Similarly, the plan would provide for investment in emergency of 2011, all the dredging and cleaning up the east coast of Falcon, the construction of drainage in the San Juan-Sanare axis -Chichiriviche, wastewater treatment,. Remarkably, in the issue of dredging is necessary to carefully evaluate the environmental impacts. Keywords: Extreme rainfalls, flood, Statistical modeling, climate change.
