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

该项目的科学目标是利用结合区域水文气候的强迫和变率模式的创新方法，开发阿萨巴斯卡河流域（ARB）水文气候预测变化情景，并适用于流域的适应规划。该项目将为我们的工业合作伙伴WaterSMART Solutions Ltd.提供更好的能力，为气候变化下的水资源管理提供切实可行的适应性战略。气候、水文和土地利用的综合建模是一个比先前与WaterSMART合作工作应用的更完整的研究框架。此外，我们将从我们研究伙伴关系的前几个阶段获得的知识中获益，以开发可靠和相关的未来方案。拟议项目中最具创新性的方面在于气候模式输出的缩尺和处理的新方法。我们将向工业伙伴提供最可靠和相关的水文气候变化预测。这将需要在气候模式输出的统计处理方面取得进展，以便我们构建包含内部自然变率的未来气候情景，从而考虑气候变化的最显著影响，以及季节和年份之间水资源的变化。年际变化和极端水文事件，而不是平均径流的长期趋势，是管理流域以及设计和维持输水和蓄水结构的最大挑战。我们将评估高分辨率区域气候模式（RCMs）模拟全范围区域水文气候变率的能力。然后，我们从rcm集合中提取每日天气数据。降尺度和偏差校正数据将应用于水文和土地利用模型，以制定ARB的未来情景。从拟议的研究中，加拿大的工业、学术机构和从事气候和水研究的科学学科将获得重大利益。＊＊＊＊

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. ****