PROJECT SUMMARY

Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) provided funding to enable researchers at PARC to apply climate scenarios from ECCC’s Regional Climate Model (RCM), and other climate model data, to the prairie region for a study future agricultural risks and opportunities in a warmer climate. We assessed the performance of RCMs in terms of their capacity to simulate the regional temperature and precipitation patterns and teleconnections with Pacific Ocean oscillations. We also analyzed the main sources of uncertainty in the projection of the future climate of western Canada. Climate change scenarios, derived from RCM data, were translated into useful information for the agricultural sector.