Climate Risks to Industrial Water Supplies in the Lower North Saskatchewan River Basin

拟议项目的目标是评估气候变化对萨斯喀彻温省中东部北萨斯喀彻温河流域下游工业用水的风险。这将需要了解全球变暖的区域后果和区域气候制度的自然变异性。我们将从树木年轮重建过去300-700年的自然变异性，并随机将这些推断的水位降至每周估计。树木年轮记录的优点是比仪器水分和天气数据的长度更长。它们也早于人类对全球气候系统的重大干预。我们将从最新一代区域气候模型中得出对未来气候和径流的预测，这些区域气候模型结合了用于模拟地表水文学的陆地表面方案。通过同化过去几个世纪和未来几十年的水文气候数据，我们将确定气候模式模拟内部(非强迫)气候变率的程度，以及模型预测变率超过古气候记录中自然变率的程度。年际至年代际变化和极端水文事件给水资源管理带来了比水量缓慢的增量变化更大的挑战。使用PIEVC协议作为气候风险评估框架，我们将与工业合作伙伴赫斯基能源和SaskPower以及政府监管机构合作，根据气候风险的概率和后果确定工业用水面临的气候风险。拟议的研究将通过提供数据和知识来限制与气候变化和潜在的水资源短缺有关的风险，从而直接使工业合作伙伴受益，并间接使加拿大能源业受益。

The objective of the proposed project is to evaluate climate change risks to industrial water supplies in the lower North Saskatchewan River Basin (NSRB) of east-central Saskatchewan. This will require knowledge of both the regional consequences of global warming and the natural variability of the regional climate regime. We will reconstruct the natural variability of the past 300-700 years from tree rings, and stochastically downscale these inferred water levels to weekly estimates. Tree-ring records have the advantage of greater length than instrumental water and weather data. They also pre-date significant human interference with the global climate system. We will derive projections of future climate and runoff from the latest generation of Regional Climate Models that incorporate Land Surface Schemes for modeling surface hydrology. By assimilating hydroclimatic data for past centuries and future decades, we will determine how well climate models simulate internal (unforced) climatic variability and the extent to which model projected variability exceeds the natural variability in the paleoclimate record. Inter-annual to decadal variability and extreme hydrologic events present a greater challenge for managing water resources than incremental slow-onset changes in water yield. Using the PIEVC protocol as a climate risk assessment framework, we will collaborate with the industrial partners, Husky Energy and SaskPower, and with government regulators to identify climate risks to industrial water supplies in terms of their probability and consequences. The proposed research will directly benefit the industrial partners, and indirectly the Canadian energy industry, by providing data and knowledge to limit risks related to climate change and potential water scarcity.