Mapping of historical design values and their future-projected changes over Canada
| dc.contributor.author | Curry, Charles L. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Annau, Nicolaas J. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Zwiers, Francis W. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Anslow, Faron | |
| dc.contributor.author | Glover, Rod | |
| dc.contributor.author | Hiebert, James | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-12-17T17:03:51Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-12-17T17:03:51Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022-04-27 | |
| dc.description | This is a paper from the 3rd International Conference on New Horizons in Green Civil Engineering (http://nhice.engr.uvic.ca), held on April 25 – 27, 2022, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. | |
| dc.description.abstract | Climate change has the potential to affect buildings and infrastructure by changing the conditions to which they are exposed. To better quantify and prepare for these changes, Infrastructure Canada and the National Research Council (NRC) recently supported a collaboration between the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC) and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to develop updated guidance to the engineering community. One facet of this work was the provision of standard climatic design values based on up-to-date historical observations at meteorological stations. Climatic data for infrastructure design are often required at locations not co-located with stations, necessitating some sort of interpolation. Purely mathematical or statistical interpolation tends to oversmooth spatial structure in station-poor areas and, depending on the technique, can exaggerate station measurement error in station-rich areas. Nor is physical consistency of the underlying climatic field in space guaranteed. We developed an approach that uses historical regional climate model (RCM) simulations as a spatial interpolator of station observations. RCMs can adequately reproduce the observed spatial patterns and probability distributions of many climate variables, with the benefit of spatiotemporal consistency—albeit in a "model world" and at spatial scales resolved by the RCM. The mapping method has been implemented as an online tool (the Design Value Explorer, or DVE) for general users to explore design value variations across Canada. The seamless transition from historical to future climate states in the RCM further allows the tool to provide projected changes to design values indexed to different levels of global warming. In this short paper, we review the development of the Design Value Explorer online tool, and showcase its main features. | |
| dc.description.reviewstatus | Unreviewed | |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Faculty | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Curry, C.L., N. Annau, F. W. Zwiers, F. Anslow, R. Glover and J. Hiebert, 2022: Mapping of historical design values and their future-projected changes over Canada, in 3rd International Conference on New Horizons in Green Civil Engineering (NHICE-03). NHICE, 4 pp. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/22997 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | New Horizons in Green Civil Engineering (NHICE) | |
| dc.subject | #journal article | |
| dc.subject | climate | |
| dc.subject | climate change | |
| dc.subject | design values | |
| dc.subject.department | School of Earth and Ocean Sciences | |
| dc.title | Mapping of historical design values and their future-projected changes over Canada | |
| dc.type | Article |