PROJECT SUMMARY

The objectives of this project were to advise a research group at the University of Alberta on the application of output from climate models and provide them with bias-corrected climate projections for Alberta watersheds. The climate data consisted of daily total precipitation, maximum and minimum daily temperature, radiation, average wind speed and daily average relative humidity from a set of 11 Regional Climate Models (RCMs). We also undertook a comparison of between paleo-hydrological models and the basin hydrological models, and evaluated the RCMs to determine how well they simulate the climate and surface hydrology of selected river basins. For the inter-model comparison of paleo-hydrological models and basin hydrological models, we constructed flow duration curves (exceedance probabilities) from 900 years of weekly flow estimates for the Athabasca, North Saskatchewan and Bow Rivers. We then compared these paleo-stochastic flows to the runoff simulated by RCMs.