UW Hydro | Columbia River Climate Change - Home Treaty Relating to Cooperative Development of the Water Resources of the Columbia River Basin, United States of AmericaCanada, January 17, 1961September 16, 1964, 15 U.S.T. Current weather in Queens Cup Basin and forecast for today, tomorrow, and next 14 days Oregon Water Resources Department. (Citation2010) interpolated existing 1/8 degree model parameters to 1/16 degree and also included previously calibrated soil parameters for the Yakima sub-basin (please see acknowledgements). About 15 sites in western Washington, outside the CRB, were also included in support of the 2009 WACCIA. 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. Table 1 summarizes the 77 future meteorological forcing datasets that were prepared for the study. Sites without modified or natural flow estimates are shown in yellow. 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. The most sensitive basins are mixed-rain-and-snow basins. The dark red lines show the average of the climate change ensemble. hL4+ze The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of other members of the CBCCSP research team at the UW including Lara Whitely Binder, Pablo Carrasco, Jeffrey Deems, Carrie Lee, Dennis P. Lettenmaier, Tyler Kamstra, Jeremy Littell, Nathan Mantua, Edward Miles, Kristian Mickelson, Philip W. Mote, Erin Rogers, Eric Salath, Amy Snover, and Andrew Wood. We used 50 parameter sets to define the initial optimization parameter space, of which the 25 best parameter sets advance in each evolution of the optimization. The multi-model ensemble 30-year mean annual temperature increases by 2.8 C (5.0 C) by late 21st century under RCP4.5 (RCP8.5) over the 1979-1990 baseline, with 18% (24%) more warming in summer. 2012. The regional report for the National Assessment was supported by two detailed water management studies focused on the CRB by Hamlet and Lettenmaier (Citation1999b) and Miles, Snover, Hamlet, Callahan and Fluharty (Citation2000). 2 Eleven sub-basins in the CRB used for large scale calibration (left panel). The smallest of these sub-basins is about 500km2 (approximately fifteen 1/16 degree VIC cells), and the largest encompasses most of the CRB (approximately 620,000km2 or about 18,800 VIC cells). Each of these methods has its specific advantages and limitations (as discussed in detail in Hamlet et al., 2010a); however, the HD method combines several important strengths of the CD and BCSD methods and was developed specifically to support the prediction of daily hydrologic extremes (Hamlet et al., 2010a). As an integrated priority, the Trust has integrated climate resilience into its strategic priorities by supporting: wildfire risk reduction and job creation through the Columbia Basin Wildfire Resiliency Initiative energy retrofits, repairs and alternative energy generation at community-purpose buildings through the Non-profit Sustainability - Building Support Grants Hydrologic climate change scenarios for the Pacific Northwest Columbia River basin and coastal drainages. PDF Chapter 4: Columbia River Basin - usbr.gov For climate change studies in the western United States where snow is an important element of the hydrologic cycle, the model's use of a sophisticated energy-balance snow model, which incorporates important effects on snow accumulation and melt associated with vegetation canopy (Andreadis, Storck, & Lettenmaier, Citation2009) has been a notable advantage. Fig. NWPCC (Northwest Power and Conservation Council). 135 0 obj <>stream A 20 percent chance of rain in the afternoon. Thursday Sunny. Figure 4 shows a flow chart of these post-processing steps. 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. The largest reductions in low flows occur west of the Cascade Range in the simulations. Broad changes in shallow groundwater (e.g., localized contributions to streamflow from smaller unconfined aquifers), however, are likely well captured by the VIC model based on a strong correlation between VIC-simulated base flows and observations in many basins examined by Wenger et al. 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 methods are discussed in more detail in these references, but a brief description of the procedure is given here to help orient the reader. Uniqueness is also evident by looking at the Columbia River Basin. 6). Until recently, a climate-change induced shift in water supply was the story of the Columbia River Basin's future. They found that the vast majority of locations across the Columbia River Basin are expected to experience increases in maximum streamflow magnitudes in the future. Thursday Night Partly cloudy. 2), for which overall errors in meteorological driving data were assumed to be relatively small; then, using these model parameters, to check the results in smaller sub-catchments. 2013a. 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. Application Process How to Apply Sign-up for Program Updates Intermediate products are available as well, which can be used by people with GIS capabilities, but with little or no knowledge of climate projections and hydrologic modelling. 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. These products are based solely on the CD and HD projections listed in Table 1. A low pressure system slowly moving offshore is forecast to spin moisture into the Columbia Basin Sunday as it meanders closer to the Southern Oregon Coast. Among its most useful features is the predominantly physical basis of the model, which largely avoids concerns about parameter stationarity in a changing climate. Peak flows actually increase at many sites in Canada because of increasing fall, winter, and spring precipitation in this part of the domain, although the peak flow also occurs about a month earlier. Des dplacements correspondants des caractristiques dcoulement fluvial du printemps et de lt vers l'hiver sont galement vidents dans les bassins o l'accumulation de neige est importante en hiver (sous le climat actuel). . Based on, Learn more about the impacts of climate change, Learn how the climate is changing in your area, Learn how our region is responding, and how you can be part of the solution, BC Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. Bias-correction procedures provide an alternative statistical approach that effectively avoids these difficulties (Shi, Wood, & Lettenmaier, Citation2008; Snover et al., Citation2003). Saturday Night And Sunday: Cloudy with a 50 percent chance of rain. West-wide studies to support USFS and USFWS needs (including current efforts to include California) will have a budget of less than half this amount, a level of efficiency that would not have been achievable without the CBCCSP pilot effort. July temperatures hover in the 90s, with several afternoons during the summer pushing the thermometer reading as high as 100 to 105 degrees. Columbia River | Location, Length, History, & Facts | Britannica Climate change scenarios for water planning studies, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, CropSyst, a cropping systems simulation model, Deep groundwater mediates streamflow response to climate warming in the Oregon Cascades, An overview of CMIP5 and the experiment design, An improved algorithm for estimating incident daily solar radiation from measurements of temperature, humidity, and precipitation. 11 Changes in 7Q10 for 297 river locations expressed as a ratio of 7Q10 for the future period to 7Q10 for the historical period based on the average of the nine or ten HD scenarios for the B1 and A1B emissions scenarios for three future time periods, by permission of I. Tohver, A.F. Explore the basics of climate science arrow . 3. Although studies addressing natural climate variability remain an important research focus for the group, over time research assessing the impacts of anthropogenic climate change has become an increasingly important need. Those who wish to do additional post-processing of the existing VIC data can access the archived model output. In addition to the time series gridded data, the long-term monthly mean data for each hydrologic variable, for each scenario, is provided in GridASCII format, compatible with ArcGIS. Extreme event statistics are calculated directly from the raw (i.e., not bias-adjusted) daily streamflows at each streamflow site, applying methods developed by Hamlet and Lettenmaier (Citation2007) and Mantua et al. Results from the study show profound changes in spring snowpack and fundamental shifts from snow and mixed-rain-and-snow to rain-dominant behaviour across most of the domain. Highs in the lower to mid 40s. Other climate change studies on the Columbia River and its sub-basins followed (Cohen, Miller, Hamlet, & Avis, Citation2000; Elsner et al., Citation2010; Hamlet, Citation2003, Citation2011; Hamlet, Lee, Mickelson, & Elsner, Citation2010b; Lee, Fitzgerald, Hamlet, & Burges, Citation2011; Lee, Hamlet, Fitzgerald, & Burges, Citation2009; NWPCC, Citation2005; Payne, Wood, Hamlet, Palmer, & Lettenmaier, Citation2004; Snover, Hamlet, & Lettenmaier, Citation2003; Vano et al., Citation2010). (2010). Climate Resilience - Columbia Basin Trust Hamlet, and S.-Y. 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. A flight of geese circle over Moses Lake Saturday morning. Based on these substantial differences in hydrologic impacts it is difficult to escape the conclusion that management of water resources in the Canadian portions of the basin will play a crucial role in the ability of US water managers to adapt to more substantial changes in streamflow timing and summer low flows in the United States. The Assessment will result in a better understanding the potential impacts of climate change on the eight components identified in SECURE in the Columbia River Basin. Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page The MOCOM-UA tool uses an objective function (defined by the user) and a shuffle complex evolution procedure to optimize model calibration parameters to create a set of Pareto (equally) optimal calibration parameters. The interested reader is directed to the CBCCSP report (Hamlet, Carrasco, et al., Citation2010a, Chapter 6) for a detailed discussion of methods and results. 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. These parameters were chosen because they strongly affect the timing and volume of runoff production in the model simulations and are, in general, not available from observed data. Highs in the lower to mid 60s. This study represents one of the first attempts to dynamically couple a sophisticated, physically based hydrologic model with a detailed crop model to estimate the integrated impacts on water supply and crop viability at a range of spatial scales. The same basic effects are seen in the SWE2PR maps, where snowmelt remains dominant in the northern tip of the CRB even at the end of the twenty-first century, whereas in the US portions of the domain there are widespread transformations of mixed-rain-and-snow river basins to rain-dominant basins and snowmelt-dominant basins to mixed-rain-and-snow basins. Produced by, Clean Energy and Green Building Major Projects, Private and public sector clean energy and green building construction projects valued at $15M or more for the 3rd quarter of each year. These basins experience dramatic losses of snowpack and substantial changes in seasonal flow timing (Fig. The site at Corra Linn Dam on the Kootenay River is representative of changing hydrographs in many locations in the northern tip of the CRB in British Columbia. Gridded datasets provide full spatial coverage (i.e., all grid cells in the model domain) at monthly time scales, of the key hydroclimatic variables listed in Table 2. As noted above, such errors are commonly encountered at relatively small spatial scales, particularly when meteorological stations are sparse, and often cannot be resolved using conventional hydrologic model calibration strategies. These emerging needs ultimately led to the CBCCSP, and similar efforts in BC led by PCIC (Werner, Schnorbus, Shrestha, & Eckstrand, Citation2013). Elsner et al. Naturalized or modified flow data were available at a number of locations in the PNW. Contract # DE-AC79-92BP21985. The CBCCSP was designed from the outset to support users with a very wide range of technical sophistication and capacity. 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. Data from the CBCCSP are currently supporting two CIG studies funded by the LCCs and the CSC, including a study of impacts to wetlands in the PNW (funded by the North Pacific LCC and the PNWCSC) and a study assessing climatic and hydrologic extremes and their effects on ecosystems over the western United States (funded by the PNWCSC). 95 0 obj <> endobj 1990 level modified streamflow 19281989. 3 Summary map of 80 streamflow locations (out of a total of 297) for which error statistics between simulated and naturalized flows were computed. Incidence of Bactericera cockerelli (Hemiptera: Triozidae) under different pesticide regimes in the lower Columbia basin. Les plus fortes augmentations dans les crues sont dans les bassins de pluie et neige mles dont les tempratures actuelles au milieu de l'hiver sont quelques degrs du point de conglation. Daily streamflow data from the CD and HD downscaling methods are first processed to extract the peak daily flow in each water year of the simulations (91 years). 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. Using the VIC model, the study has projected impacts for the Great Busin and the Columbia River, Missouri River, and Colorado River basins, and assessment of impacts in California is underway at the time of writing. The process was also significantly improved by researchers at PCIC who reconfigured and optimized the code to run more efficiently on a Linux cluster (Schnorbus, Bennett, Werner, & Berland, Citation2011). Basin topographic map and smoothed basin boundary at 1/16 degree resolution. These include the following: Columbia River Basin Impact Assessment: Reclamation conducted the Columbia River Basin Impact Assessment to evaluate the potential effects of future climate change on river flows at 158 locations across the basin.