Hydrological response to dynamical downscaling of climate model outputs: A case study for western and eastern snowmelt-dominated Canada catchments

Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies

卷:4

Juan Alberto Velázquez¹  Daniel Caya¹  Magali Troin¹  François Brissette² 

[1] Centre ESCER, Université du Québec à Montréal, CP 8888, Succ. “Centre-Ville”, Montréal, Québec H3C 3P8, Canada;

[2] Department of construction Engineering, École de technologie supérieure, Université du Québec, 1100 Notre-Dame Street West, Montréal, Québec H3C 1K3, Canada;

关键词: GCMs;    CRCM;    SWAT;    Snowmelt modeling;    Uncertainty;    Canada;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.ejrh.2015.09.003

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Study region: An analysis of hydrological response to a dynamically downscaled multi-member multi-model global climate model (GCM) ensemble of simulations based on the Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM) is presented for three snowmelt-dominated basins in Canada. The basins are situated in the western mountainous (British Columbia) and eastern level (Quebec) regions in Canada, providing comprehensive experiments to validate the CRCM over various topographic features.Study focus: The evaluation of the CRCM as a tool to improve GCM simulations of catchment scale hydrology is investigated within the bounds of uncertainty associated with RCM simulations. Daily climate variables were extracted from a 30-year CRCM and GCM ensemble simulations. The hydrological response was assessed through the comparison of catchment water components simulated by SWAT.New hydrological insights for the region: Results show that the CRCM captures the primary features of observed climate, but there are significant biases. Most noteworthy are a positive bias in precipitation and a negative bias in temperature over the BC basin. When looking at the hydrological modeling results, the benefit of using the RCM versus GCMs emerged distinctly for the mountainous BC basin where the RCM is preferred over the GCMs. The sensitivity experiments show that uncertainty in the GCM/RCM’s internal variability must be assessed to provide suitable regional hydrological responses to climate change.

【 授权许可】

Unknown