Detection of decadal and interdecadal oscillations and temporal trend analysis of climate and hydrological time series, Canadian Prairies

Abstract

To better understand the natural modes of discharge from the Athabasca River and perform an appropriate trend prediction for the sustainability study of the oilsand development in Alberta, long term instrumental records of annual river discharge, temperature, and precipitation time series from Canadian Prairie provinces were collected and analyzed for decadal and inter-decadal oscillation. Three types of methods, auto-correlation, composite method and spectral analysis, were applied to extract the long-term natural variation. Synthetic time series, consisting of known periodic components of different cycle length and magnitude, mixed with linear trend and red noise, were simulated and examined to help gain a better understanding of the behaviours of the quasi-periodic variation in the acquired real time series.