Grant: Engage Grants Program

The company-specific problem addressed by the proposed project is augmenting the company's watershed management models with projections of future climate and water variability. The industrial partner, WaterSMART Solutions Ltd., develops practical adaptive responses to climate changes impacts on surface water supplies. They have the expertise and capacity to evaluate and recommend adjustments to water management practices and structures to achieve sustainable use of water. WaterSMART requires a method and model that will enable them to determine the probabilities of shifts in the distribution in river flows in response to projected climate changes. The proposed Engage project would provide this for the Bow River Basin using innovative methods of climate change research. In addition to extensive analysis of instrumental climate and water records, we also will use high-resolution paleoclimate data and climate models to investigate climate fluctuations at longer time scales, and to provide context for recent climate variability and emerging trends. The most common scenarios of future climate are model outputs averaged over decades and large areas, however, watersheds and infrastructure are not managed for average conditions, but rather for extremes: flooding and especially drought. The most challenging climate changes are related to amplified hydroclimatic variability. Our approach to deriving scenarios of climate variability is based on the 'double' downscaling of model output, statistically by regressing stream gauge records against climate indices, and dynamically using high-resolution regional climate models. Many runs of climate models will be re-sampled, generating sufficient data to determine the probability of exceeding critical values for climatic and hydrologic parameters, as defined in collaboration with our industrial partners. This research will realize economic and environmental benefits by providing data and knowledge to 1) limit risk from climate variability, 2) inform water resource management and engineering design, and 3) reduce the enormous costs associated with climate variability and extremes.