Future climate and hydrologic variability in the Colorado River Basin

William "Ryan" Currier

Tuesday, Mar 16, 2021, 2:00 pm


Abstract

Regional hydrologic projections over the Colorado River Basin often utilize Global Climate Models (GCM’s) forced with different emissions scenarios and are then downscaled to higher spatial resolutions to account for topography. This seminar will focus on increasing the physical representation in the downscaling process and hydrologic model. We will introduce and show results using two relatively new climate downscaling tools and compare their climate change signal to other commonly used downscaling methods. One new downscaling technique is the Ensemble Generalized Analog Regression Downscaling (En-GARD) tool, which incorporates upper atmospheric variables (e.g., 500 mb meridional and zonal winds) and surface variables (e.g., precipitation and temperature) into the climate downscaling. Additionally, we dynamically downscaled GCMs using the Intermediate Complexity Atmospheric Research (ICAR) model. Lastly, we will discuss the hydrologic projections within a newly calibrated Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model vs. previous configurations of VIC.

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Seminar Contact: psl.seminars@noaa.gov