Supporting adaptation planning in the Athabasca River Basin with advances in the projection of hydroclimatic variability

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The scientific objectives of this project are to develop scenarios of projected changes in the hydroclimate of the Athabasca River Basin (ARB) using innovative methods that incorporate the forcing and modes of variability in the regional hydroclimate and are applicable to adaption planning in the basin. The project will provide our industrial partner, WaterSMART Solutions Ltd., with improved capabilities to deliver practical adaptive strategies for water management under climate change. The integrated modeling of climate, hydrology and land use is a more complete research framework than that applied to prior collaborative work with WaterSMART. Furthermore, we will profit from the knowledge gained from previous phases of our research partnership to develop robust and relevant future scenarios. The most innovative aspects of the proposed project lie in novel methods of downscaling and processing of climate model outputs. We will provide the industrial partner with the most reliable and relevant projections of hydroclimatic changes. This will require advances in the statistical processing of climate model output, so that we construct scenarios of future climate that incorporate the internal natural variability, and thus the most significant impact of a changing climate, the shift in water resources among seasons and years. 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. We will evaluate the capacity of high-resolution Regional Climate Models (RCMs) to simulate the full range of regional hydroclimate variability. Then we extract daily weather data from an ensemble of RCMs. Downscaling and bias-corrected data will be applied to hydrological and land use models to develop future scenarios for the ARB. From the proposed research, significant benefits will accrue to Canadian industry, academic institutions, and to scientific disciplines engaged in climate and water research.