scholarly journals Impacts of climate and forest changes on streamflow and water balance in a mountainous headwater stream in Southern Alberta

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 8503-8536 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Mahat ◽  
A. Anderson

Abstract. Rivers in Southern Alberta are vulnerable to climate change because much of the river water originates as snow in the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Changes in likelihood of forest disturbance (wildfire, insects, logging, etc.) may also have impacts that are compounded by climate change. This study evaluates the impacts of climate and forest changes on streamflow in the upper parts of the Oldman River in Southern Alberta using a conceptual hydrological model, HBV-EC in combination with a stochastic weather generator (LARS-WG) driven by GCM (Global Climate Model) output climate data. Three climate change scenarios (A1B, A2 and B1) are selected to cover the range of possible future climate conditions (2020s, 2050s, and 2080s). GCM projected less than a 10% increase in precipitation in winter and a similar amount of precipitation decrease in summer. These changes in projected precipitation resulted in up to a 200% (9.3 mm) increase in winter streamflow in February and up to a 63% (31.2 mm) decrease in summer flow in June. This amplification is mostly driven by the projected increase in temperature that is predicted to melt winter snow earlier, possibly resulting in lower water availability in the snowmelt dominated regions during the summer. Uncertainty analysis was completed using a guided GLUE (generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation) approach to obtain the best 100 parameter sets and associated ranges of streamflows. The impacts of uncertainty were higher in spring and summer flows than in winter and fall flows. Forest change compounded the climate change impact by increasing winter flow; however, it did not reduce the summer flow.

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (12) ◽  
pp. 4941-4956 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Mahat ◽  
A. Anderson

Abstract. Rivers in Southern Alberta are vulnerable to climate change because much of the river water originates as snow in the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Changes in likelihood of forest disturbance (wildfire, insects, logging, etc.) may also have impacts that are compounded by climate change. This study evaluates the impacts of climate and forest changes on streamflow in the upper parts of the Oldman River in Southern Alberta using a conceptual hydrological model, HBV-EC (Hydrologiska Byråns attenbalansavdelning, Environment Canada), in combination with a stochastic weather generator (LARS-WG) driven by GCM (global climate model) output climate data. Three climate change scenarios (A1B, A2 and B1) are selected to cover the range of possible future climate conditions (2020s, 2050s, and 2080s). The GCM projected less than a 10% increase in precipitation in winter and a similar amount of precipitation decrease in summer. These changes in projected precipitation resulted in up to a 200% (9.3 mm) increase in winter streamflow in February and up to a 63% (31.2 mm) decrease in summer flow in June. Flow also decreased in July and August, when irrigation is important; these reduced river flows during this season could impact agriculture production. The amplification in the streamflow is mostly driven by the projected increase in temperature that is predicted to melt winter snow earlier, resulting in lower water availability during the summer. Uncertainty analysis was completed using a guided GLUE (generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation) approach to obtain the best 100 parameter sets and associated ranges of streamflows. The impacts of uncertainty in streamflows were higher in spring and summer than in winter and fall. Forest change compounded the climate change impact by increasing the winter flow; however, it did not reduce the summer flow.


Data ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abhishek Gaur ◽  
Michael Lacasse ◽  
Marianne Armstrong

Buildings and homes in Canada will be exposed to unprecedented climatic conditions in the future as a consequence of global climate change. To improve the climate resiliency of existing and new buildings, it is important to evaluate their performance over current and projected future climates. Hygrothermal and whole building simulation models, which are important tools for assessing performance, require continuous climate records at high temporal frequencies of a wide range of climate variables for input into the kinds of models that relate to solar radiation, cloud-cover, wind, humidity, rainfall, temperature, and snow-cover. In this study, climate data that can be used to assess the performance of building envelopes under current and projected future climates, concurrent with 2 °C and 3.5 °C increases in global temperatures, are generated for 11 major Canadian cities. The datasets capture the internal variability of the climate as they are comprised of 15 realizations of the future climate generated by dynamically downscaling future projections from the CanESM2 global climate model and thereafter bias-corrected with reference to observations. An assessment of the bias-corrected projections suggests, as a consequence of global warming, future increases in the temperatures and precipitation, and decreases in the snow-cover and wind-speed for all cities.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Lim ◽  
Aurel Moise ◽  
Raizan Rahmat ◽  
Bertrand Timbal

<p>Southeast Asia (SEA) is a rapidly developing and densely populated region that is home to over 600 million people. This, together with the region’s high sensitivity, exposure and low adaptive capacities, makes it particularly vulnerable to climate change and extremes such as floods, droughts and tropical cyclones. While the last decade saw some countries in SEA develop their own climate change projections, studies were largely uncoordinated and most countries still lack the capability to independently produce robust future climate information. Following a proposal from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Regional Association (RA) V working group on climate services, the ASEAN Regional Climate Data, Analysis and Projections (ARCDAP) workshop series was conceived in 2017 to bridge these gaps in regional synergies. The ARCDAP series has been organised annually since 2018 by the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre (hosted by Meteorological Service Singapore) with support from WMO through the Canada-funded Climate Risk and Early Warning Systems (Canada-CREWS) initiative.</p><p>This presentation will cover the activities and outcomes from the first two workshops, as well as the third which will be held in February 2020. The ARCDAP series has so far brought together representatives from ASEAN National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs), climate scientists and end-users from policy-making and a variety of vulnerability and impact assessment (VIA) sectors, to discuss and identify best practices regarding the delivery of climate change information, data usage and management, advancing the science etc. Notable outputs include two comprehensive workshop reports and a significant regional contribution to the HadEX3 global land in-situ-based dataset of temperature and precipitation extremes, motivated by work done with the ClimPACT2 software.</p><p>The upcoming third workshop will endeavour to encourage the uptake of the latest ensemble of climate simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) using CMIP-endorsed tools such as ESMValTool. This will address the need for ASEAN climate change practitioners to upgrade their knowledge of the latest global climate model database. It is anticipated that with continued support from WMO, the series will continue with the Fourth workshop targeting the assessment of downscaling experiments in 2021.</p>


2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 674-677 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Kearney ◽  
Natalie J. Briscoe ◽  
David J. Karoly ◽  
Warren P. Porter ◽  
Melanie Norgate ◽  
...  

There is strong correlative evidence that human-induced climate warming is contributing to changes in the timing of natural events. Firm attribution, however, requires cause-and-effect links between observed climate change and altered phenology, together with statistical confidence that observed regional climate change is anthropogenic. We provide evidence for phenological shifts in the butterfly Heteronympha merope in response to regional warming in the southeast Australian city of Melbourne. The mean emergence date for H. merope has shifted −1.5 days per decade over a 65-year period with a concurrent increase in local air temperatures of approximately 0.16°C per decade. We used a physiologically based model of climatic influences on development, together with statistical analyses of climate data and global climate model projections, to attribute the response of H. merope to anthropogenic warming. Such mechanistic analyses of phenological responses to climate improve our ability to forecast future climate change impacts on biodiversity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 217-230
Author(s):  
María Pilar Amblar-Francés ◽  
María Asunción Pastor-Saavedra ◽  
María Jesús Casado-Calle ◽  
Petra Ramos-Calzado ◽  
Ernesto Rodríguez-Camino

Abstract. Over the past decades, the successive Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIPs) have produced a huge amount of global climate model simulations. Along these years, the climate models have advanced and can thus provide credible evolution of climate at least at continental or global scales since they are better representing physical processes and feedbacks in the climate system. Nevertheless, due to the coarse horizontal resolution of global climate models, it is necessary to downscale these results for their use to assess possible future impacts of climate change in climate sensitive ecosystems and sectors and to adopt adaptation strategies at local and national level. In this vein, the Spanish State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) has been producing since 2006 a set of reference downscaled climate change projections over Spain either applying statistical downscaling techniques to the outputs of the Global Climate Models (GCMs) or making use of the information generated by dynamical downscaling techniques through European projects or international initiatives such as PRUDENCE, ENSEMBLES and EURO-CORDEX. The AEMET strategy aims at exploiting all the available sources of information on climate change projections. The generalized use of statistical and dynamical downscaling approaches allow us to encompass a great number of global models and therefore to provide a better estimation of uncertainty. Most impact climate change studies over Spain make use of this reference downscaled projections emphasizing the estimation of uncertainties. Additionally to the rationale and history behind the AEMET generation of climate change scenarios, we focus on some preliminary analysis of the dependency of estimated uncertainties on the different sources of data.


2016 ◽  
Vol 155 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. S. SILVA ◽  
L. KUMAR ◽  
F. SHABANI ◽  
M. C. PICANÇO

SUMMARYTomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is one of the most important vegetable crops globally and an important agricultural sector for generating employment. Open field cultivation of tomatoes exposes the crop to climatic conditions, whereas greenhouse production is protected. Hence, global warming will have a greater impact on open field cultivation of tomatoes rather than the controlled greenhouse environment. Although the scale of potential impacts is uncertain, there are techniques that can be implemented to predict these impacts. Global climate models (GCMs) are useful tools for the analysis of possible impacts on a species. The current study aims to determine the impacts of climate change and the major factors of abiotic stress that limit the open field cultivation of tomatoes in both the present and future, based on predicted global climate change using CLIMatic indEX and the A2 emissions scenario, together with the GCM Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)-Mk3·0 (CS), for the years 2050 and 2100. The results indicate that large areas that currently have an optimum climate will become climatically marginal or unsuitable for open field cultivation of tomatoes due to progressively increasing heat and dry stress in the future. Conversely, large areas now marginal and unsuitable for open field cultivation of tomatoes will become suitable or optimal due to a decrease in cold stress. The current model may be useful for plant geneticists and horticulturalists who could develop new regional stress-resilient tomato cultivars based on needs related to these modelling projections.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elin Lundstad ◽  
Yuri Brugnera ◽  
Stefan Brönnimann

<p>This work describes the compilation of global instrumental climate data with a focus on the 18th and early 19th centuries. This database provides early instrumental data recovered for thousands of locations around the world. Instrumental meteorological measurements from periods prior to the start of national weather services are designated “early instrumental data”. Much of the data is taken from repositories we know (GHCN, ISTI, CRUTEM, Berkeley Earth, HISTALP). In addition, many of these stations have not been digitized before. Therefore,  we provide a new global collection of monthly averages of multivariable meteorological parameters before 1890 based on land-based meteorological station data. The product will be form as the most comprehensive global monthly climate data set, encompassing temperature, pressure, and precipitation as ever done. These data will be quality controlled and analyzed with respect to climate variability and they be assimilated into global climate model simulations to provide monthly global reconstructions. The collection has resulted in a completely new database that is uniform, where no interpolations are included. Therefore, we are left with climate reconstruction that becomes very authentic. This compilation will describe the procedure and various challenges we have encountered by creating a unified database that can later be used for e.g. models. It will also describe the strategy for quality control that has been adopted is a sequence of tests.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1370-1382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asma Hanif ◽  
Ashwin Dhanasekar ◽  
Anthony Keene ◽  
Huishu Li ◽  
Kenneth Carlson

Abstract Projected climate change impacts on the hydrological regime and corresponding flood risks were examined for the years 2030 (near-term) and 2050 (long-term), under representative concentration pathways (RCP) 4.5 (moderate) and 8.5 (high) emission scenarios. The United States Army Corps of Engineers' (USACE) Hydrologic Engineering Center's Hydrologic Modeling System was used to simulate the complete hydrologic processes of the various dendritic watershed systems and USACEs' Hydrologic Engineering Center's River Analysis System hydraulic model was used for the two-dimensional unsteady flow flood calculations. Climate projections are based on recent global climate model simulations developed for the International Panel on Climate Change, Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project Phase 5. Hydrographs for frequent (high-recurrence interval) storms were derived from 30-year historical daily precipitation data and decadal projections for both time frames and RCP scenarios. Since the climate projections for each scenario only represented ten years of data, 100-year or 500-year storms cannot be derived. Hence, this novel approach of identifying frequent storms is used as an indicator to compare across the various time frames and climate scenarios. Hydrographs were used to generate inundation maps and results are used to identify vulnerabilities and formulate adaptation strategies to flooding at 43 locations worldwide.


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