PROJECT SUMMARY

This project was a collaboration with scientists at the University of Alberta. Climate change will alter the spatial and temporal distribution of water supplies in Alberta. Understanding the dynamics of water flows and allocations is needed to enable timely policy decisions and better target investments in efficient water infrastructures and management facilities. This project sought to convey to stakeholders the risks and opportunities as a result of changes in future local water availabilities. Physically based modeling, using the SWAT model, enabled numerical simulation of the dynamics of basin hydrology and the response of hydrological processes to projected shifts in temperature and precipitation. Another approach taken at PARC was to examine the hydrology simulated by the Land Surface Schemes embedded in Regional Climate Models (RCM). This approach has the advantage of the coupled modeling of climate and hydrology thus capturing the hydrological response to transient changes in climatic variability; although the LSS is much less complex than the SWAT hydrological model. The use of complimentary approaches represents a robust solution to the problem of projecting future river flows. We were able to evaluate of the uncertainties associated with using different climate models and various formulations of the SWAT hydrological model.