Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The ability to predict future climate and forecast tomorrow's weather has important implications for Canadians. While the atmosphere plays a crucial role in these simulations, models representing the ocean and land surfaces greatly influence exchanges of heat and moisture. These surfaces are "boundaries" for the atmosphere and have received much attention lately to help improve weather prediction and climate simulations. Over land surfaces, efforts focused first on representing major elements of the climate system where data was available to build and test the models. As such, these land surface schemes provide good representation of many landforms under normal conditions. Work is continuing with these models to extend and test their abilities to cope with more hostile environments such as Canadian's far north and during periods of extreme weather such as drought. To handle extreme conditions, it is important to focus on land surface boundaries. Earlier work on river and lake lateral boundaries will soon assist in flood prediction. Lower boundaries, however, have received far less attention. At the lower bound of the land surface, groundwater and permafrost exists and these take on greater importance during extremes. Groundwater reserves provide a much needed water supply during drought. The sustainability of these supplies during extended drought and their role in drought evolution is unknown. Similarly, permafrost extent under climate warming is also very uncertain. Both streamflow generation and soil strength for civil infrastructure depend on how permafrost will evolve under climate warming. This grant will build on-going research in drought and cold regions hydrology to: i) simulate groundwater over a large prairie areas influenced by drought and to ii) generate downscaled climate over research basins in Canadian cold regions to evaluate climate impacts. This focus on improved representation of boundaries for land surface schemes will add to Canada's research capacity in climate and weather prediction under conditions of extreme.