Practical and direct downscaling of water level projections for adaptation planning

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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.