Climate Change Impact on Water Resources and Adaptation to Climate Extremes

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As demand for freshwater on a global scale rises, land use and climate change (CC) render its availability into the future uncertain. CC is expected to affect local water availability, river discharge, and the seasonal availability of water supply, thus making adaptation measures for water indispensable for a wide range of social and environmental aspects. In this context, the applicant has contributed to understanding the effects of the hydrometeorological variables on a global, continental and basin scale. His contributions includes analysis of global precipitation projections that indicates that today's extreme events will intensify. Hydrological modeling at watershed scale reveals the potential of an increased risk of severe flooding and prolonged droughts, thus suggesting that existing practices and policies for CC adaptation need to be improved and updated. The applicant will apply state-of-the-art climate data derived from high resolution CC forcing sets to bridge climate change output with the basin scale modeling requirements. An improved bias correction method for daily temperature and sub-daily precipitation that radically reduces the uncertainty will be developed. The scope of the research proposal is the advancement of fundamental understanding of CC impact on water resources and extremes with the key objectives of: (a) improving understanding of global climate change and its effects on floods and droughts through hydrological applications, (b) developing and extending CC analysis methodologies, (c) producing new high resolution climatic datasets suitable for water resources and extreme events research as well as their inherent risks, (d) providing training to researchers and disseminate information, methodologies and results. The methodology to be carried out will follow four main activities: (1) Adoption of non-hydrostatic RCMs in Canadian domain, (2) Improved Bias Adjustment Method to downscale relevant hydrological variables to basin scale, (3) Evaluation of the decadalscale prediction scheme and (4) Scenarios for water resources and hydrological extremes applications in Canada. The novelty of this proposal resides with the research in high priority areas (high resolution climate datasets for Canada using non-hydrostatic models), development and application of innovative methodologies to reduce the uncertainty, evaluation of the decadalscale prediction scheme to produce time-evolving predictions of policy development applications. The proposed research is expected to have a significant impact at both scientific and policy levels. Improved understanding of the cross scale interactions of global climate and local water availability and extremes will promote both mitigation and adaptation measures against the impacts of CC. New methodologies and datasets will elevate the science of climate and hydrology further, driving the development of Canadian CC Research within the academic, public, industrial and government sectors.