Future hydroclimatic extremes and adaptive basin planning, Oldman and South Saskatchewan river basins

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The objectives of the proposed CRD project are to provide the industrial partner, WaterSMART Solutions Ltd., with innovative solutions for developing projections of future climate and water availability, applying these future scenarios to the company's hydrological and watershed management models, and working with stakeholders develop adaptive water management strategies for the Oldman and South Saskatchewan River Sub-basins in southern Alberta. The novel scientific methodology employs a combination of statistical and dynamic modeling, data from climate proxies and a network of water and weather gauges, and output from ensembles of regional and global climate models. The most commonly reported scenarios of future climate are projected changes in mean climate and water levels. Watersheds and infrastructure are much more easily managed for these average conditions than for extremes: flooding and especially drought. The proposed project investigates the full range of variability in the regional hydroclimate of the recent past and near future by analyzing an archive of high-resolution paleoclimate data and the outputs from climate models. Using these data, we will construct and run statistical models of annual and seasonal streamflow as a function of the large-scale climate patterns (teleconnection indices) that drive the interannual to decadal variability of the hydroclimate of western North America. This scale of variability is important for our understanding of the stationarity of the regional climate regime, and for water resource planning and management for infrequent events, specifically sustained drought. The university researchers will work WaterSMART Solutions and its contractors to apply our projections of hydroclimatic variability to a river basin management model enabling a live modeling session involving a large group of water managers and other stakeholders from the river basins.