Future design flood values in the Fraser and Peace River basins using the CanESM2-LE
Date
2023-03-30
Authors
Schnorbus, Markus A.
Ben Alaya, Mohamed Ali
Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC)
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC)
Abstract
PCIC has completed a project to quantify design flood values (2-, 20-, 50-, 100- and 200-year events) for historical and future periods and make them accessible as a gridded product via PCIC's Climate Explorer tool. This work represents a continuation of the work reported by Schoeneberg et al. (2021) and Schnorbus and Sun (2022) and uses a spatial domain that includes the original 234,000 km2 Fraser River basin, but with the addition of gridded design values for the Peace River basin above Peace River, AB (194,000 km2 ). Results are provided for every model grid cell in the domain at a spatial resolution of 0.0625°, and design flood values for each grid are based on streamflow routed from the area upstream of the selected cell. Hence, watershed areas range from ~30 km2 (i.e., the area of a single headwater grid cell) to ~234,000 km2 . Flood design values have been provided at a temporal discretization based on 30-year sliding windows centered every 10-years on 2015 (2001-2030), 2025 (2011-2040), 2035 (2021- 2050), 2045 (2031-2060), 2055 (2041-2070), 2065 (2051-2080), 2075 (2061-2090), 2085 (2071-2100). This work takes advantage of hydrologic projections produced by PCIC using the VIC-GL hydrology model driven with the CanESM2 50-member large ensemble (CanESM2-LE), which allows for statistically robust estimation of large return-period events.
Description
Keywords
UN SDG 13: Climate Action, #project and summary reports, Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC)