Practical and direct downscaling of water level projections for adaptation planning

拟议的CRD项目的目标是优化和验证预测未来水位变化的实用方法，并将这些水文气候情景应用于阿尔伯塔中部红鹿河流域的适应规划。这些方法和模型将提高WaterSMART Solutions Ltd.的能力，为政府和行业提供务实和可实施的适应性对策，以应对气候变化对地表水供应的影响。大学研究人员和工业伙伴之间的现有伙伴关系是有效和富有成效的，满足了客户的迫切需要。拟议的CRD项目将使我们能够合作完善和验证模型和方法，并确保这些方法可以转移到其他流域。这项研究是创新的，从传统的水文响应气候变化的建模，产生重要的信息，流域产水量的潜在变化，但通常继承气候变率的校准时间序列的持续时间短。相比之下，我们的项目调查了最近的过去和不久的将来区域水文气候的变化范围，结合水文数据推断从树木年轮代理和来自区域气候模型。最新一代的RCM包括模拟流域径流的高级陆面方案。这些高分辨率模型嵌套在全球环流模型中，模拟海洋-大气环流，驱动区域水文状况的年际至十年变化。年际变化和极端水文事件，而不是平均径流的长期趋势，是流域管理以及设计和维护输水和蓄水结构的主要挑战。该大学的研究人员将与WaterSMART Solutions及其承包商合作，将我们对水文气候变化的预测应用于流域管理模型，并将其应用于涉及红鹿河流域的大量水资源管理人员和其他利益相关者的模型的现场运行。

The objectives of the proposed CRD project are to optimize and validate a practical approach to projecting future water level variability, and to apply these hydroclimatic scenarios to adaptation planning in the Red Deer River basin of central Alberta. The methods and models will enhance the capacity of WaterSMART Solutions Ltd. to provide government and industry with pragmatic and implementable adaptive responses to climate change impacts on surface water supplies. An existing partnership between the university researchers and industrial partner has been effective and productive, and met the immediate needs of clients. The proposed CRD project will enable us to collaboratively refine and validate the models and methods and ensure that the methods are transferable to other river basins. The research is innovative by departing from the conventional modeling of hydrologic responses to climate change, which produces important information about potential changes in basin water yield, but usually inherits climate variability from a calibration time series of short duration. In contrast, our project investigates the full range of variability in the regional hydroclimate of the recent past and near future by incorporating hydrological data inferred from tree ring proxies and derived from Regional Climate Models. The latest generation of RCMs includes advanced land surface schemes that simulate basin runoff. These high-resolution models are nested within Global Circulation Models that simulate the ocean-atmosphere circulation that drives the inter-annual to decadal variability of the regional hydrologic regime. Inter-annual variability and extreme hydrologic events, rather than long-term trends in mean runoff, present most of the challenge for managing watersheds and for designing and maintaining water conveyance and storage structures. The university researchers will work with WaterSMART Solutions and its contractors to apply our projections of hydroclimatic variability to a river basin management model and to a live run of the model involving a large group of water managers and other stakeholders from the Red Deer River basin.