A calibrated 1/16 degree latitude-longitude resolution implementation of the VIC hydrologic model over the Columbia River basin was used to produce historical simulations and 77 future hydrologic projections associated with three different statistical downscaling methods and three future time periods (2020s, 2040s, and 2080s). The two time periods also represent very different patterns of decadal climate variability in the historical record, providing a useful test in the context of simulating a changing climate. Instead, these areas respond primarily to projected changes in precipitation until late in the twenty-first century, and in fact some of these areas show modest increases in SWE (about +5%) until the middle of the twenty-first century under the combined effects of warming and increasing cool season precipitation. Treaty Relating to Cooperative Development of the Water Resources of the Columbia River Basin, United States of AmericaCanada, January 17, 1961September 16, 1964, 15 U.S.T. Act relating to water resource management in the Columbia river basin, H.R. 7). Retrieved from, Climate change and resource management in the Columbia River Basin. Table 1 summarizes the 77 future meteorological forcing datasets that were prepared for the study. The VIC model has been widely applied in climate change studies at both the regional scale (e.g., Christensen & Lettenmaier, Citation2007; Lettenmaier, Wood, Palmer, Wood, & Stakhiv, Citation1999; Maurer, Citation2007; Maurer & Duffy, Citation2005; Payne et al., Citation2004; Van Rheenen, Wood, Palmer, & Lettenmaier, Citation2004) and global scale (e.g., Adam, Hamlet, & Lettenmaier, Citation2009; Nijssen, O'Donnell, Hamlet, & Lettenmaier, Citation2001). 7 Left panel: Simulated historical 1 April snow water equivalent (SWE) (upper right) and percentage changes in 1 April SWE for two emissions scenarios and three future time periods extracted from the CD VIC scenarios. 8) and warmer and drier summers (which increase PET) (Fig. These products are based solely on the HD projections listed in Table 1. 2010. Fine-scale calibration of the model to compensate for such errors, although technically feasible, is of questionable utility, because it essentially ensures that the model is getting something closer to the right answer for the wrong reasons, which in turn has the potential to distort the sensitivity of the model to changing future conditions (Bennett, Werner, & Schnorbus, Citation2012). An understanding of the basin's transboundary nature has also informed CIG's hydrologic modelling studies, which have consistently provided complete coverage of the Canadian and US portions of the basin. Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page For the future scenarios, the range of the projections (pink shading) is plotted. These basins experience dramatic losses of snowpack and substantial changes in seasonal flow timing (Fig. In this case only modified flows (2000-level modified flows obtained from the BPA (Crook, Citation1993)) were used to train the bias-correction procedure, even if naturalized flows were also available. Changes in snowpack are a key driver of hydrologic impacts in the PNW (Elsner et al., Citation2010; Hamlet & Lettenmaier, Citation1999b). The regional report for the National Assessment was supported by two detailed water management studies focused on the CRB by Hamlet and Lettenmaier (Citation1999b) and Miles, Snover, Hamlet, Callahan and Fluharty (Citation2000). USFWS (US Fish & Wildlife Service). 2013. The PET increases over most of the PNW in summer as a result of rising temperatures; however, AET is reduced in all but a few areas of the domain because AET is water limited and summer precipitation decreases in the simulations. 2), for which overall errors in meteorological driving data were assumed to be relatively small; then, using these model parameters, to check the results in smaller sub-catchments. Key products from the study include detailed summary data for about 300 river sites in the PNW and monthly GIS products for 21 hydrologic variables over the entire study domain. Among its most useful features is the predominantly physical basis of the model, which largely avoids concerns about parameter stationarity in a changing climate. Columbia Basin Care is the region's only independent nonprofit skilled nursing facility for long-term care and short-term rehabilitation. Thus, depending on their needs and level of technical sophistication, stakeholders can make the best use of the study products by extracting information at different points in the data processing sequence, all of which are available on the study web site. The Columbia Basin Climate Source is your one-stop destination for information about climate change, impacts, and action in this region. These include the full meteorological forcings for the model (variables 18), a suite of water balance variables simulated by the model (variables 916), and five different PET metrics (variables 1721) (Elsner et al., Citation2010). Right panel: Historical estimates of summer AET (upper right) compared with percentage changes for the same CD scenarios. Based on these substantial differences in hydrologic impacts it is difficult to escape the conclusion that management of water resources in the Canadian portions of the basin will play a crucial role in the ability of US water managers to adapt to more substantial changes in streamflow timing and summer low flows in the United States. Flooding in the Columbia River basin expected to increase under climate change Date: February 10, 2021 Source: Oregon State University Summary: The Columbia River basin will see an increase. The largest changes in flood risk are simulated in mixed-rain-and-snow basins. The VIC model (version 4.0.7) was implemented at 1/16 degree resolution, with three active soil layers and up to five elevation bands with an approximate spacing of 500m. The model was run in water balance mode with a snow model time step of 1h and a water balance time step of 24h. The model was coupled to a simple daily-time-step routing model (Lohmann, Raschke, Nijssen, & Lettenmaier, Citation1998), which was used to produce daily flow estimates at each of the approximately 300 streamflow locations included in the study. Temperature and precipitation vary greatly with elevation, but in the central basin January average daily temperatures are between about 25 and 30 F (4 and 1 C), and July averages are mostly between 70 and 75 F (21 and 24 C). The Columbia Basin Climate Change Scenarios Project (CBCCSP) was conceived as a comprehensive hydrologic database to support climate change planning, impacts assessment, and adaptation in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) by a diverse user community with varying technical capacity over a wide range of spatial scales. 'High Uncertainty' is indicated when Mahalanobis Distance is >1. Primary support for the project was provided by WDOE, with additional major support provided by the BPA, NWPCC, BCME, OWRD, and CTED via the 2009 WACCIA (http://cses.washington.edu/cig/res/ia/waccia.shtml) (Miles et al., Citation2010). Building the Columbia Basin-Boundary Region's Capacity to Adapt to Climate Change. 120 0 obj <>/Filter/FlateDecode/ID[<6FB239FABFBE0241AD2ED78CAB939AAB><0AF5FFF7A9777A438917926E6F546C9A>]/Index[95 41]/Info 94 0 R/Length 116/Prev 312890/Root 96 0 R/Size 136/Type/XRef/W[1 3 1]>>stream Topographic corrections for precipitation and temperature are carried out by rescaling the data by a fixed factor for each calendar month so that the mean values from 1971 to 2000 match the PRISM climatology for the same period. Bias adjustment was also used in preparing the specific reservoir modelling support products discussed below. Calibration of the VIC model was carried out using an automated calibration tool called MOCOM-UA developed by the Land Surface Hydrology group at the UW, following the approach described by Yapo, Gupta, and Sorooshian (Citation1998). The study also used the ColSim reservoir operations model (Hamlet & Lettenmaier, Citation1999b) to estimate water deliveries to the Columbia Basin Project (the primary irrigation project supplied by water from Grand Coulee Dam) under future climate scenarios using streamflows generated by the integrated VIC/CropSyst model. Reductions in spring snowpack and summer streamflow, for example, are relatively modest in the Canadian portions of the basin because of cold winter temperatures that delay warming-related impacts to seasonal snowpack (Elsner et al., Citation2010). Northeast wind 5 to 10 mph. Casola, J. H., Kay, J. E., Snover, A. K., Norheim, R. A., Binder, L. C. W., & the Climate Impacts Group. To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below: Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content? A primary motivation for the study was to support planning at geographic scales ranging from relatively small river basins (e.g., planning studies in individual sub-basins, such as the Yakima or Okanagan basins) to main-stem planning studies for the CRB as a whole (e.g., planning studies for the Columbia River hydro system). Using these resources, other modelling groups can carry out their own investigations of hydrologic impacts using either their own hydrologic model (just using the driving data) or the VIC implementation from the CBCCSP. One of the fundamental difficulties with this task was that there was not, at the time, an available database of hydrologic projections that could support such planning, and regulatory agencies such as WDOE did not have the capacity or expertise to produce these resources themselves. 3099067 In the remainder of this paper, we present an overview of the development of the CBCCSP, a description of the primary methods used to produce the study databases, an overview of the products and information the study databases provide, and some high-visibility examples of the use of these products and services in regional planning. These results support the hypothesis that widespread increases in winter landslide risks and sediment transport in rivers are likely to accompany increased winter precipitation and loss of interannual snowpack in mountain watersheds. Gusts up to 20 mph in the morning. This has prompted the National Weather Service to issue a winter weather advisory for the Tri-Cities, Walla Walla, Hermiston, and surrounding areas in effect from 04:00 to 22:00 Sunday. The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of other members of the CBCCSP research team at the UW including Lara Whitely Binder, Pablo Carrasco, Jeffrey Deems, Carrie Lee, Dennis P. Lettenmaier, Tyler Kamstra, Jeremy Littell, Nathan Mantua, Edward Miles, Kristian Mickelson, Philip W. Mote, Erin Rogers, Eric Salath, Amy Snover, and Andrew Wood. Associated shifts in streamflow timing from spring and summer to winter are also evident in basins that currently have significant snow accumulation in winter, whereas rain-dominant basins show minimal shifts in streamflow timing. 8). 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG. Les principaux produits de ltude comprennent des donnes sommaires pour environ 300 sites fluviaux dans la rgion pacifique nordouest et des produits mensuels de Systme d'information gographique pour 21 variables hydrologiques couvrant tout le domaine ltude. Depending on their needs and/or level of technical sophistication, users can tap into the study databases at a number of different levels. It drains roughly 260,000 square miles and travels more than 1,240 miles from its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to its confluence with the Pacific Ocean. Figure 1. As noted above, the study also supports planning efforts over a wide range of geographic scales. The methods are discussed in more detail in these references, but a brief description of the procedure is given here to help orient the reader. The summary figures for water balance variables at each site have the same format, two examples of which are shown in Fig. For example, researchers who wish to run their own hydrologic models can do so by downloading the statistically downscaled meteorological forcings from the study. Yakima River Basin Study Both floods (Q100) and extreme 7-day low flows (7Q10) increase in intensity for most of the river sites simulated. The CBCCSP was developed to address these diverse needs. Peak flows actually increase at many sites in Canada because of increasing fall, winter, and spring precipitation in this part of the domain, although the peak flow also occurs about a month earlier. These annual peak daily flows are then ranked and assigned a quantile value using an unbiased quantile estimator based on the method of Cunane (Stedinger, Vogel, & Foufoula-Georgiou, Citation1993). Each of the six panels in the figure shows the long-term monthly mean for the 10 (9 for B1) HD GCM scenarios (red lines) and the historical simulations (blue lines). Snover, A. K., Hamlet, A. F., Lee, S.-Y., Mantua, N. J., Salath, E. P. Jr, Steed, R., & Tohver, I. A number of sub-basins are nested within each other, as shown in the right panel along with their relative sizes. Although results from the WACCIA would arguably have been adequate to support WDOE's adaptation planning, the CBCCSP provided additional foundation support for these efforts, and helped improve confidence in the outcomes of the adaptation strategies identified by better quantifying a range of outcomes. The process was also significantly improved by researchers at PCIC who reconfigured and optimized the code to run more efficiently on a Linux cluster (Schnorbus, Bennett, Werner, & Berland, Citation2011). Current weather in Queens Cup Basin and forecast for today, tomorrow, and next 14 days The multi-model ensemble 30-year mean annual temperature increases by 2.8 C (5.0 C) by late 21st century under RCP4.5 (RCP8.5) over the 1979-1990 baseline, with 18% (24%) more warming in summer. Figure 10 shows a map of Q100 ratios (future Q100 to historical Q100) for 297 river locations and a scatterplot of the Q100 ratio as a function of winter temperature regime in each basin. 5; Yakima River at Parker in Fig. The interested reader is directed to the CBCCSP report (Hamlet, Carrasco, et al., Citation2010a, Chapter 6) for a detailed discussion of methods and results. Using the VIC model, the study has projected impacts for the Great Busin and the Columbia River, Missouri River, and Colorado River basins, and assessment of impacts in California is underway at the time of writing. The largest increases in flooding are in mixed-rain-and-snow basins whose current mid-winter temperatures are within a few degrees of freezing. Instead our primary goal was to encompass the approximate range of all available scenarios while reducing costs by downscaling projections from a subset of the larger group of 20 GCMs (Hamlet et al., 2010a). Other impacts, such as changes in soil moisture dynamics are also apparent in the simulations. For example, to support academic or agency researchers with their own hydrologic modelling capability, the study provides projections of meteorological drivers such as temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, and humidity and a calibrated VIC hydrologic model implementation. The CBCCSP, in particular, provided access to additional scenarios and downscaling methods that provided a range of hydrologic outcomes associated with uncertainty in the climate projections, which the WACCIA assessments largely did not. In addition, some observed streamflow data are suitable for use as natural data if the effects of storage and diversions are relatively small (e.g., for the USGS Hydro-Climatic Data Network streamflow sites). Small black dots indicate streamflow sites where naturalized flows were not available.