Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that the statistical properties of precipitation and temperature will change under the future climate condition, and this will cause a significant impact on water resources and its management at watershed scale. This study investigated the hydrological response to climate change for Spencer Creek watershed located in Southern Ontario, Canada. The precipitation and temperature projection used in this study were obtained from the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) climate simulations. NARCCAP climate projections were bias- corrected for meteorological stations representative of the watershed. The biascorrected NARCCAP climate projections were used as input in a calibrated hydrological model Hydrologiska Byrans Vattenbalans-avdelning (HBV) to simulate flows at the outlet of the watershed. The improvement of bias-corrected NARCCAP precipitation and temperature is revealed by Brier and Rank Probability Skill Score (BSS and RPSS, respectively). The comparison of current and future simulated flow results reveals an increase in winter daily average flows and decrease in other seasons, and approximately 13% increase in annual evapotranspiration under future climate condition. An increase in high flows and decrease in low flows under future climate is revealed by flowduration analysis.
Highlights
The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report [1] indicates that our climate is undergoing substantial warming, and it is likely that an increasing trend of extreme precipitation will continue
The potential impact of climate change on the hydrology of Spencer Creek watershed was analyzed based on the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) provided eight regional climate models (RCMs)+GCM pair’s precipitation and temperature projections and simulations by using Hydrologiska Byråns Vattenbalans-avdelning (HBV) hydrologic model for the current (19712000) and future (2041-2070) period
An overall improvement for the quality of NARCCAP precipitation and temperature simulations at both Hamilton Airport and Hamilton RBG meteorological stations was achieved when bias correction was applied. Both Brier skill score (BSS) and rank probability skill score (RPSS) indicate that improvement is high in the late spring and summer months in the case of precipitation
Summary
The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report [1] indicates that our climate is undergoing substantial warming, and it is likely that an increasing trend of extreme precipitation will continue. Climate change impact on hydrological processes has been performed by forcing climate model output to a hydrological model in order to evaluate changes in future flow in the Spencer Creek watershed located in Southern Ontario. Past research on climate change impact assessment revealed that the hydrological regime of different watersheds could be significantly modified due to the anticipated changes in temperature and precipitation under future climate during the present century [3,4,5]. Sultana and Coulibaly [4] assessed the climate change impact on hydrological processes of this watershed using a distributed coupled MIKE SHE/MIKE 11 hydrologic model and the projected daily precipitation and temperature from Canadian global climate model (CGCM 3.1). Most of the future flow simulations show an increase in winter discharge and a decrease in spring discharge
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