(Citation2010), but the essential idea behind the methods is that monthly gridded data are based only on serially complete and quality-controlled HCN and AHCCD stations (thus ensuring self-consistent long-term trends based on the same group of stations), but daily variations within the month come from re-gridded daily co-op station data, which add additional spatial detail on an event basis at daily time scales (Hamlet & Lettenmaier, Citation2005). The Columbia River is the fourth largest river in North America and the largest river in the Pacific Northwest. The Columbia Basin-Boundary region is already experiencing a climate thats different from 50 years ago. The study was also unique in that this was the first time that these agencies had run their own reservoir operation models to assess climate change impacts in the CRB, an element of the study design which greatly increased the impact of the study conclusions in the agencies involved. For the future scenarios, the range of the projections (pink shading) is plotted. Explore the basics of climate sciencearrow_forward, Explore detailed climate projectionsarrow_forward, Learn more about the impacts of climate changearrow_forward, Learn how the climate is changing in your areaarrow_forward, Learn how our region is responding, and how you can be part of the solutionarrow_forward, The extent of glaciers in 1984, 2000, and 2021. These approaches are also useful for avoiding biases in the streamflow simulations that result from systematic errors in gridded precipitation or temperature data. In this section we provide an overview of the methods associated with the primary elements of the CBCCSP. Elsner et al. The largest changes in flood risk are simulated in mixed-rain-and-snow basins. Fig. The CBCCSP was developed to address these diverse needs. A set of simpler, lumped-storage reservoir operations models was used to quantify impacts in a number of smaller water supply systems. Thus, by selecting 10 GCM scenarios with good historical performance that also spanned the range of impacts, we effectively reduced the computational and storage requirements of the CBCCSP by approximately a factor of two. Right panel: Same data shown as a scatter plot of the average ratio of Q100 for the 2040s A1B scenarios to Q100 for the historical period versus historical basin-average mid-winter (DJF) temperature in each case. unpublished manuscript). Using these resources, other modelling groups can carry out their own investigations of hydrologic impacts using either their own hydrologic model (just using the driving data) or the VIC implementation from the CBCCSP. The sweeping statements in the 2007 IPCC AR4 (Solomon et al., Citation2007) regarding the scientific consensus on observed warming (unequivocal) and the direct human role in the alteration of the climate system (90% confidence) made it clear to many management professionals that the waiting game for climate change planning was nearing an end. 6). Isaak DJ et al. This approach was partly based on practical limitations on time and computational resources but was also informed by previous experience using the VIC model at finer spatial scales. Pink bands show the range of nine or ten HD climate change scenarios for B1 and A1B emissions scenarios for three future time periods. Les simulations dcoulements de crue et dtiage augmentent en intensit pour la plupart des sites fluviaux compris dans cette tude. Detailed water balance summaries and streamflow data for up to 300 river locations to be specified by WDOE and other stakeholders in the region. The CBCCSP provided climate change projections of meteorological drivers and a calibrated VIC implementation in support of the study. The results were only slightly better than those achieved in the large-scale calibration. Multi-Objective Complex Evolution Procedure, developed at the University of Arizona (Yapo et al., A water resources simulation model developed by Labadie (, National Centers for Environmental Prediction, Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, University of Victoria. An understanding of the basin's transboundary nature has also informed CIG's hydrologic modelling studies, which have consistently provided complete coverage of the Canadian and US portions of the basin. Inset numbers at the upper left in the future projections are the percentage changes in 1 April SWE averaged over each grid cell in the entire domain. Crook, A. G. (1993). Blue lines show average historical values (19162006) (repeated in each panel). The data is accessible for decision makers, researchers, students, professionals and the public. The PET is shown to increase dramatically over most of the domain (primarily because of warming in the scenarios), whereas AET shows widespread declines east of the Cascade Range. From ecosystems, communities, and infrastructure, to our way of lifeeverything will be affected. Forest ecosystems, disturbance, and climatic change in Washington State, USA, Regional scale hydrology: I. Formulation of the VIC-2L model coupled to a routing model, A Pacific interdecadal climate oscillation with impacts on salmon production, Climate change impacts on streamflow extremes and summertime stream temperature and their possible consequences for freshwater salmon habitat in Washington State, Uncertainty in hydrologic impacts of climate change in the Sierra Nevada, California under two emissions scenarios, Uncertainty in projections of streamflow changes due to climate change in California, Climate change predicted to shift wolverine distributions, connectivity, and dispersal corridors, The WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset: A new era in climate change research, Assessing regional impacts and adaptation strategies for climate change: The Washington Climate Change Impacts Assessment as a case study, Pacific Northwest regional assessment: The impacts of climate variability and climate change on the water resources of the Columbia River basin, Climate-driven variability and trends in mountain snowpack in western North America, Declining mountain snowpack in western North America. Corresponding shifts in the seasonal timing of streamflow are also relatively small in the Canadian CRB until late in the twenty-first century. If neither naturalized nor modified flow is available, no bias-adjusted data were provided. Fig. Associated shifts in streamflow timing from spring and summer to winter are also evident in basins with significant snow accumulation in winter (for the current climate). This choice was imposed by WDOE. Economic value of long-lead streamflow forecasts for Columbia River hydropower, Effects of projected climate change on energy supply and demand in the Pacific Northwest and Washington State, Columbia River streamflow forecasting based on ENSO and PDO climate signals, Effects of climate change on hydrology and water resources in the Columbia River basin, Long-range climate forecasting and its use for water management in the Pacific Northwest Region of North America, Production of temporally consistent gridded precipitation and temperature fields for the continental U.S, Effects of 20th century warming and climate variability on flood risk in the western U.S, Effects of temperature and precipitation variability on snowpack trends in the western U.S, An improved method for estimating surface humidity from daily minimum temperature, Optimized flood control in the Columbia River basin for a global warming scenario, Methodology for developing flood rule curves conditioned on El Nio-Southern Oscillation classification, Daily time step refinement of optimized flood control rule curves for a global warming scenario, Improving water resources system performance through long-range climate forecasts: The Pacific Northwest experience (Chapter 7), Water resources implications of global warming, a U.S. regional perspective, Simulations of the ENSO hydroclimate signals in the Pacific Northwest Columbia River basin, A simple hydrologically based model of land surface water and energy fluxes for general circulation models. In relatively small basins (approximately 5001500km2), of which there are a substantial number included in the study, errors in meteorological driving data are often a strong determinant of simulation errors. Fig. The city's average temperature is 57 F (14 C). These include the full meteorological forcings for the model (variables 18), a suite of water balance variables simulated by the model (variables 916), and five different PET metrics (variables 1721) (Elsner et al., Citation2010). Saturday: Mostly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of rain. This web site provides streamflow information for the Columbia River and coastal drainages in Washington and Oregon State for the 21st century based on a large number of climate scenarios and model experiments. Implications of global climate change for snowmelt hydrology in the 21st century, Modeling snow accumulation and ablation processes in forested environments, Uncertainties in hydrologic and climate change impact analyses in headwater basins of British Columbia. This has prompted the National Weather Service to issue a winter weather advisory for the Tri-Cities, Walla Walla, Hermiston, and surrounding areas in effect from 04:00 to 22:00 Sunday. Either naturalized or modified flows (Crook, Citation1993) are used for bias correction of data provided in the site-specific products discussed below, with naturalized data taking precedence if available. For the CD and HD downscaling methods, which construct a 91-year time series for both historical and future time periods, three future time periods were selected: 2020s (20102039), 2040s (20302059), and 2080s (20702099). Ltude a produit une squence de traitements de donnes de bout en bout, la fine pointe, partant d'une sortie brute de modle climatique pour aboutir une srie de produits de modlisation hydrologique, qui sont offerts la communaut d'utilisateurs via une base de donnes Web. As mentioned above, 20062007 was something of a turning point for regional stakeholders considering future actions to prepare for climate change. 95 0 obj
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July temperatures hover in the 90s, with several afternoons during the summer pushing the thermometer reading as high as 100 to 105 degrees. This advance through the native forest has been driven, primarily, by cattle ranching. Here, however, we show the same figures in metric units. The greater Mississippi River Basin (MRB) is the largest river basin in North America and the fourth largest basin in the world. The top two panels show the Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) (left) and R 2 (right) for the calibration period, while the two lower panels show NSE (left) and R 2 (right) for the validation period. Fig. Current weather in Queens Cup Basin and forecast for today, tomorrow, and next 14 days The study employs a state-of-the-art, end-to-end data processing sequence that moves from raw GCM output to a set of final hydrological products that can be accessed by the user community from a web-accessible database. Thanks to Sean Fleming (Environment Canada) for spearheading this contribution to Atmosphere-Ocean. A primary motivation for the study was to support planning at geographic scales ranging from relatively small river basins (e.g., planning studies in individual sub-basins, such as the Yakima or Okanagan basins) to main-stem planning studies for the CRB as a whole (e.g., planning studies for the Columbia River hydro system). The two time periods also represent very different patterns of decadal climate variability in the historical record, providing a useful test in the context of simulating a changing climate. Fig. Summary information and statistics: geographic location, basin area, calibration statistics (if available), links to the USGS or ECAN websites, and so forth. The Columbia River basin will see an increase in flooding over the next 50 years as a result of climate change, new modeling from Oregon State University indicates. Detailed forecast for Upper Columbia Basin Tonight Mostly clear. The RMJOC is specifically dedicated to reviewing the practices, procedures, and processes of each agency to identify changes that could improve the overall efficiency of the operation and management of the Federal Columbia River Power System projects. Thus, each site is bias-corrected using either naturalized or modified flow but not both. Blue lines show the average historical values (19162006) (repeated in each panel). Source: Bonneville Power Administration. Although results from the WACCIA would arguably have been adequate to support WDOE's adaptation planning, the CBCCSP provided additional foundation support for these efforts, and helped improve confidence in the outcomes of the adaptation strategies identified by better quantifying a range of outcomes. Statistics for hydrologic extreme events (as discussed above) are presented in a different format, shown in Fig. For the BCSD runs (for which the ability to capture key elements of the region's climate variability is arguably even more important to the outcomes) the projections based on the seven highest ranked GCMs (Table 1) were selected for each emissions scenario. Thanks also to Nancy Stephan (BPA), John Fazio and Jim Ruff (NWPCC), Allan Chapman and Ben Kagasniemi (BCME), and Barry Norris (OWRD) for their contributions to the initial study design. A 20 percent chance of rain in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 80s. To learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our Cookie Policy. These techniques remove systematic biases in the simulations of routed streamflow to produce products that closely match the long-term statistics of a natural or modified flow dataset for a particular site. hb```"V* aB@{= ,!It#GjWeyP1% 120 0 obj
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Climate change impacts on water management and irrigated agriculture in the Yakima River basin, Washington, USA, Potential implications of PCM climate change scenarios for California hydrology and water resources, The role of climate forecasts in western U.S. power planning, Flow regime, temperature and biotic interactions determine winners and losers among trout species under climate change, Macroscale hydrologic modeling of ecologically relevant flow metrics, Projected changes in climate, snowpack, evapotranspiration and streamflow in the Canadian portion of the Columbia River basin, The distributed hydrology soil vegetation model, A distributed hydrology-vegetation model for complex terrain, Hydrologic implications of dynamical and statistical approaches to downscaling climate model outputs, Long range experimental hydrologic forecasting for the eastern U.S, Multi-objective global optimization for hydrological models. Among its most useful features is the predominantly physical basis of the model, which largely avoids concerns about parameter stationarity in a changing climate. Instead our primary goal was to encompass the approximate range of all available scenarios while reducing costs by downscaling projections from a subset of the larger group of 20 GCMs (Hamlet et al., 2010a). Hamlet, and S.-Y. These emerging needs ultimately led to the CBCCSP, and similar efforts in BC led by PCIC (Werner, Schnorbus, Shrestha, & Eckstrand, Citation2013). The largest increases in flooding are in mixed-rain-and-snow basins whose mid-winter temperatures are presently within a few degrees of freezing. In addition, some observed streamflow data are suitable for use as natural data if the effects of storage and diversions are relatively small (e.g., for the USGS Hydro-Climatic Data Network streamflow sites). The bias-corrected monthly values are then used to rescale the simulated daily flow sequences produced by the hydrologic model to produce bias-corrected daily streamflows. In the first five years (19952000) of operation, the research efforts of CIG were primarily directed towards the assessment of the impacts of interannual and interdecadal climate variability associated with ENSO (Battisti & Sarachik, Citation1995; Trenberth, Citation1997) and the PDO (Gershunov & Barnett, Citation1998; Mantua, Hare, Zhang, Wallace, & Francis, Citation1997). One of the fundamental difficulties with this task was that there was not, at the time, an available database of hydrologic projections that could support such planning, and regulatory agencies such as WDOE did not have the capacity or expertise to produce these resources themselves. Observations around the world demonstrate that the global atmosphere has been warming rapidly since the 1970s, with temperatures up an average of 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit in that time and expected to increase between 1 and 4 degrees by the 2030s, Pytlak said. A number of regional partners provided recommendations for streamflow locations and other in-kind support including Jesse Abner (MDNR), Steve Running (University of Montana), Hal Anderson (IDWR) Levi Brekke, Pat McGrane and John Roache (USBR), Carolyn Fitzgerald (Seattle District USACE), Seshu Vaddey and Randy Wortman (Portland District USACE). The model shows reasonably good calibration statistics for the majority of the sites, and the calibration is robust (showing equally good or better statistics in the validation period when compared with the calibration period). 2013a. Blue traces show monthly averages for historical conditions; the pink bands show the range of projected change associated with each scenario and future time period; the red lines show the average of the future ensemble. Register a free Taylor & Francis Online account today to boost your research and gain these benefits: An Overview of the Columbia Basin Climate Change Scenarios Project: Approach, Methods, and Summary of Key Results, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences , University of Notre Dame , Notre Dame , Indiana , USA, Technical Service Center 86-68210, US Bureau of Reclamation , Denver , Colorado , USA, Climate Impacts Group , University of Washington , Seattle , Washington , USA, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and Climate Impacts Group , University of Washington , Seattle , Washington , USA, Adaptation to Future Water Shortages in the United States Caused by Population Growth and Climate Change, Climate Change Impacts on Fisheries and Aquaculture of the United States, Climate Change and Future Wildfire in the Western United States: An Ecological Approach to Nonstationarity, Crossscale interactions dictate regional lake carbon flux and productivity response to future climate, Drought Conditions Maximize the Impact of High-Frequency Flow Variations on Thermal Regimes and Biogeochemical Function in the Hyporheic Zone, Fine-scale environmental DNA sampling reveals climate-mediated interactions between native and invasive trout species, Future Climate Change Impacts on Streamflows of Two Main West Africa River Basins: Senegal and Gambia, Geomorphological principles for phased sediment management, How Do Modeling Decisions Affect the Spread Among Hydrologic Climate Change Projections? Simulation of spatial variability in snow and frozen soil, A multi-model ensemble approach to assessment of climate change impacts on the hydrology and water resources of the Colorado River basin, CIG (Climate Impacts Group). Naturalized and modified streamflow data were used to produce bias-corrected streamflow realizations (see below). Figure 10 shows a map of Q100 ratios (future Q100 to historical Q100) for 297 river locations and a scatterplot of the Q100 ratio as a function of winter temperature regime in each basin. Rain dominant basins (DJF temperatures greater than 2C) show moderate increases in flood risk (primarily reflecting increasing storm intensity in the simulations), whereas snowmelt-dominant basins that currently flood in June show relatively little change in flood risk. Lows in the lower to mid 30s. The highest value of baseflow is Ds max (in millimetres of runoff per time step) for a saturated soil layer; Ws represents the soil moisture threshold below which the baseflow curve is linear; and Ds is the baseflow value (in millimetres) at this breakpoint. Casola, J. H., Kay, J. E., Snover, A. K., Norheim, R. A., Binder, L. C. W., & the Climate Impacts Group. Elsner MM, et al. Special thanks to Kurt Unger and Ken Slattery, who were the primary architects of the CBCCSP at WDOE. Flooding in these basins is sensitive to both warming (which raises snow lines and effectively enlarges the contributing basin area during most flood events) and increasing winter precipitation. Most of the fundamental details regarding the VIC implementation used in this study are covered by Elsner et al. .. slide 2 of 5. 2 Eleven sub-basins in the CRB used for large scale calibration (left panel). Read on for information on our current project. It is important to acknowledge that opinions differ on the utility or even possibility of improving ensembles of future projections based on the ability to simulate the past climate (e.g., Gleckler, Taylor, & Doutriaux, Citation2008). Future work on the project will likely focus on expanding the number of streamflow sites for which products are available (e.g., inclusion of additional sites in coastal Oregon in the site-specific products) and providing a comprehensive suite of products associated with CMIP5 results (Taylor, Stouffer, & Meehl, Citation2012) associated with IPCC AR5.