Flooding in the Columbia River basin expected to increase under climate change Date: February 10, 2021 Source: Oregon State University Summary: The Columbia River basin will see an increase. It reaches a thickness estimated at 16,000 feet in places. Figure 1. By closing this message, you are consenting to our use of cookies. A knowledge-based approach to the statistical mapping of climate, A statistical-topographic model for mapping climatological precipitation over mountainous terrain, Constructing retrospective gridded daily precipitation and temperature datasets for the conterminous United States, Implications of 21st century climate change for the hydrology of Washington State, Interdecadal modulation of ENSO teleconnections, The role of transboundary agreements in the Columbia River basin: An integrated assessment in the context of historic development, climate, and evolving water policy, Assessing water resources adaptive capacity to climate change impacts in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. In this section we provide an overview of the methods associated with the primary elements of the CBCCSP. Text files (six per figure) providing all the ensemble data used to construct each panel in the figure are also provided on the CBCCSP website. If neither naturalized nor modified flow is available, no bias-adjusted data were provided. How essential is hydrologic model calibration to seasonal streamflow forecasting? One of the major climate change impacts already being seen in the Columbia Basin has been the decreases in winter snowpack, the increase in winter precipitation events, and the resulting shifts in flow regime in the Columbia River and its tributaries. For example, researchers who wish to run their own hydrologic models can do so by downloading the statistically downscaled meteorological forcings from the study. These extended meteorological data have proved particularly useful in supporting ecological studies (e.g., Littell et al., Citation2010). Many locations could see increases of 100% or more in the 50-year and 100-year flood magnitude, with some smaller tributaries potentially seeing increases of as much as 175%. Casola, J. H., Kay, J. E., Snover, A. K., Norheim, R. A., Binder, L. C. W., & the Climate Impacts Group. 1990 level modified streamflow 19281989. Topographic corrections for precipitation and temperature are carried out by rescaling the data by a fixed factor for each calendar month so that the mean values from 1971 to 2000 match the PRISM climatology for the same period. 3 Summary map of 80 streamflow locations (out of a total of 297) for which error statistics between simulated and naturalized flows were computed. The BCSD runs are transient runs from 1950 to 2098 or 1950 to 2099 (depending on the GCM). In relatively wet and cool areas along the coast and at high elevation in the northern parts of the basin, summer AET is energy limited; therefore, rising temperatures result in increases in AET. (2005). Yorgey, G. G., Rajagopalan, K., Chinnayakanahalli, K., Brady, M., Barber, M. E., Nelson, R., Stockle, C. S., Kruger, C. E., Dinesh, S., Malek, K., Yoder, J., & Adam, J. C. (2011). Lows in the lower to mid 30s. (, Washington State Department of Community Trade and Economic Development, Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model, A Monte Carlo hydropower and water resources simulation model developed by the NWPCC, Hybrid Delta statistical downscaling method, HYDropower SIMulation, a hydropower and water resources simulation model used by the BPA in the CRB, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Columbia River Basin Basin Overview . Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below: If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. Economic value of long-lead streamflow forecasts for Columbia River hydropower, Effects of projected climate change on energy supply and demand in the Pacific Northwest and Washington State, Columbia River streamflow forecasting based on ENSO and PDO climate signals, Effects of climate change on hydrology and water resources in the Columbia River basin, Long-range climate forecasting and its use for water management in the Pacific Northwest Region of North America, Production of temporally consistent gridded precipitation and temperature fields for the continental U.S, Effects of 20th century warming and climate variability on flood risk in the western U.S, Effects of temperature and precipitation variability on snowpack trends in the western U.S, An improved method for estimating surface humidity from daily minimum temperature, Optimized flood control in the Columbia River basin for a global warming scenario, Methodology for developing flood rule curves conditioned on El Nio-Southern Oscillation classification, Daily time step refinement of optimized flood control rule curves for a global warming scenario, Improving water resources system performance through long-range climate forecasts: The Pacific Northwest experience (Chapter 7), Water resources implications of global warming, a U.S. regional perspective, Simulations of the ENSO hydroclimate signals in the Pacific Northwest Columbia River basin, A simple hydrologically based model of land surface water and energy fluxes for general circulation models. A 20 percent chance of rain in the afternoon. Oregon Water Resources Department. These products are based solely on the HD projections listed in Table 1. Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab. These basins experience dramatic losses of snowpack and substantial changes in seasonal flow timing (Fig. Yakima River Basin Study A comprehensive website was to be developed to serve all the data produced by the study, at no cost, to the general public, management professionals agency staff members, scientific researchers, private sector consultants, etc. The strategy for model calibration used in the CBCCSP was to calibrate 11 relatively large sub-basins within the domain (Fig. Over the last several years, the USFS and USFWS have engaged with the CIG to produce a set of initial climate change hydrologic scenarios over much of the west using a common methodology intended to support landscape-scale assessment of climate change impacts (Littell et al., Citation2011). Littell, J. S., Elsner, M. M., Mauger, G. S., Lutz, E. R., Hamlet, A. F., & Salath, E. P. (2011). Bias adjustment was also used in preparing the specific reservoir modelling support products discussed below. Fig. %PDF-1.6 % The changes in the importance of snow in some areas of the United States are particularly striking. The site at Corra Linn Dam on the Kootenay River is representative of changing hydrographs in many locations in the northern tip of the CRB in British Columbia. By late 21st century, annual precipitation increases by 5% (8%), with an 8% (14%) winter increase and a 4% (10%) summer decrease, but because . 2010. The MRB encompasses 24 terrestrial ecosystems, providing habitat for 100 species of mammals, reptiles, and amphibians Its floodplain supports 40% of the waterfowl and wading birds in North America, and the MRB's . Figures and summary tables for long-term average monthly precipitation, monthly average temperature, evapotranspiration, PET4 (Table 2), PET5 (Table 2), total column soil moisture, SWE, combined flow (runoff+baseflow). #! O Snover, A. K., Hamlet, A. F., Lee, S.-Y., Mantua, N. J., Salath, E. P. Jr, Steed, R., & Tohver, I. The VIC implementations make use of preprocessed soil and vegetation databases for the basin of interest. These parameters were chosen because they strongly affect the timing and volume of runoff production in the model simulations and are, in general, not available from observed data. The study also used the ColSim reservoir operations model (Hamlet & Lettenmaier, Citation1999b) to estimate water deliveries to the Columbia Basin Project (the primary irrigation project supplied by water from Grand Coulee Dam) under future climate scenarios using streamflows generated by the integrated VIC/CropSyst model. Final calibration results for the model are shown in Fig. 2013a. Tonight Mostly cloudy. 3. This advance through the native forest has been driven, primarily, by cattle ranching. These techniques remove systematic biases in the simulations of routed streamflow to produce products that closely match the long-term statistics of a natural or modified flow dataset for a particular site. Hi/Low, RealFeel, precip, radar, & everything you need to be ready for the day, commute, and . Bias-correction procedures provide an alternative statistical approach that effectively avoids these difficulties (Shi, Wood, & Lettenmaier, Citation2008; Snover et al., Citation2003). Hydrologic climate change scenarios for the Pacific Northwest Columbia River basin and coastal drainages. 95 0 obj <> endobj To learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our Cookie Policy. As noted above, the study also supports planning efforts over a wide range of geographic scales. Fig. The largest increases in flooding are in mixed-rain-and-snow basins whose current mid-winter temperatures are within a few degrees of freezing. Subsetted from the, Averaged periodic drought condition ranking by basin for 2015-2020 from the, Mapped extent of wildfires from 1950-2020 from, Air quality monitoring stations within the study area. This approach was partly based on practical limitations on time and computational resources but was also informed by previous experience using the VIC model at finer spatial scales. La base de donnes du CBCCSP s'est avre une ressource publique prcieuse qui a permis de rduire normment les cots lis un certain nombre dtudes de haute visibilit dans la rgion pacifique nordouest et dans l'ouest des tatsUnis axes sur la coordination technique et la planification. Building the Columbia Basin-Boundary Region's Capacity to Adapt to Climate Change. Each product is provided as a gridded file (one file for each variable and calendar month) in ASCII format. In relatively small basins (approximately 5001500km2), of which there are a substantial number included in the study, errors in meteorological driving data are often a strong determinant of simulation errors. Highs around 80. A remote sensing approach, The NorWeST Summer Stream Temperature Model and Scenarios for the Western U.S.: A Crowd-Sourced Database and New Geospatial Tools Foster a User Community and Predict Broad Climate Warming of Rivers and Streams, The coastal streamflow flux in the Regional Arctic System Model, Tidal-Fluvial and Estuarine Processes in the Lower Columbia River: II. The multi-model ensemble 30-year mean annual temperature increases by 2.8 C (5.0 C) by late 21st century under RCP4.5 (RCP8.5) over the 1979-1990 baseline, with 18% (24%) more warming in summer. Click the download link to get the current station data. Act relating to state agency climate leadership, S. 5560, 61st Legislature (WA 2009). Application Process How to Apply Sign-up for Program Updates During the study (and afterwards), some stakeholders expressed interest in including less optimistic emissions scenarios (such as SRES A1FI), in order to better understand the implications of a potential worst case scenario. (Citation2010) interpolated existing 1/8 degree model parameters to 1/16 degree and also included previously calibrated soil parameters for the Yakima sub-basin (please see acknowledgements). Inset numbers at the upper left in the future projections are the percentage changes in 1 April SWE averaged over each grid cell in the entire domain. The objective function for the optimization process in this case was: where Q is the monthly streamflow; NSE(Q) is the NSE (monthly flow), which varies between [inf, 1] and typically between [0,1]; NSE(log(Q+1)) is the NSE (monthly flow), which varies between [inf, 1] (this metric places less emphasis on high flow errors in calculating NSE); Vol_Err(Q) is the annual volume error (in 1000 acre feet); R 2(Q)=R 2 (squared correlation coefficient between simulated and observed Q), which varies between [0,1]; Peak_Diff(Q) is the mean hydrograph peak differencethe absolute value varies for different sites; RMSE(Q) is the root mean square error, whose absolute value varies for different sites; and NumSC(Q) is the number of sign changes in the errors (this metric penalizes simulations with too much month-to-month variability in comparison with observations). Saturday Night And Sunday: Cloudy with a 50 percent chance of rain. In other words, although at these sites the model results do not match the observations in the absolute sense (large bias), the relative changes follow the observed variations quite well (high R 2). Because of a general lack of observed naturalized daily time-step flow for most streamflow sites, daily time step calibration using additional parameters such as the infiltration parameter (bi ) in VIC (Liang et al., Citation1994), or routing parameters (such as the unit hydrograph for each cell) were not attempted during the study. Water Level Models, Floodplain Wetland Inundation, and System Zones, Using expressed behaviour of coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) to evaluate the vulnerability of upriver migrants under future hydrological regimes: Management implications and conservation planning. These products are available for all 77 climate scenarios listed in Table 1, as well as for the historical simulation. For climate change studies in the western United States where snow is an important element of the hydrologic cycle, the model's use of a sophisticated energy-balance snow model, which incorporates important effects on snow accumulation and melt associated with vegetation canopy (Andreadis, Storck, & Lettenmaier, Citation2009) has been a notable advantage. Although this project consists of an abbreviated set of scenarios and products using three scenarios (high, medium, and low impact) for one downscaling method, the CBCCSP played an important role in providing an established set of methods for developing historical driving datasets and implementing and running the hydrologic models. The Assessment was initiated in June 2013 and is expected to completed in December 2015. Communities across the region and around the world are demonstrating that its possible to adapt, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and continue to thrive. The NSE scores for about 20 sites are marginal (between 0.3 and 0.7). Adjusted and Homogenized Canadian Climate Data, British Columbia Ministry of Environment (Canada), Bias Correction and Spatial Disaggregation, Columbia Basin Climate Change Scenarios Project, Composite Delta statistical downscaling method, Climate Impacts Group, University of Washington, Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (Two)Supported the IPCC TAR, Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (Three)Supported the IPCC AR4, Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (Five)Supports the IPCC AR5, A water resources simulation model for the CRB developed by Hamlet and Lettenmaier (, A crop system simulation model developed by Stckle et al. Based on, Learn more about the impacts of climate change, Learn how the climate is changing in your area, Learn how our region is responding, and how you can be part of the solution, BC Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. Each of the six panels in the figure shows the long-term monthly mean for the 10 (9 for B1) HD GCM scenarios (red lines) and the historical simulations (blue lines). Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine. Monday: A chance of snow before 4 p.m., then a slight chance of rain and snow. Right panel: Same data shown as a scatter plot of the average ratio of Q100 for the 2040s A1B scenarios to Q100 for the historical period versus historical basin-average mid-winter (DJF) temperature in each case. In 2008, many of the financial and institutional barriers to climate change assessment and adaptation that had been erected over the preceding eight years by the Bush Administration were substantially reduced by the incoming Obama Administration. Here we will review a few important aspects of the basic implementation to help orient the reader and will then focus most of our attention on the additional implementation and calibration tasks carried out during the CBCCSP. 2), for which overall errors in meteorological driving data were assumed to be relatively small; then, using these model parameters, to check the results in smaller sub-catchments. Citation2000) were selected as the basis for the study because they provide a) a wide range of plausible outcomes while also reflecting some potential GHG mitigation by the end of the twenty-first century, and b) most of the approximately 20 GCM projections associated with the CMIP3 archived runs from both emission scenarios (Mote & Salath, Citation2010). The Columbia River basin will see an increase in flooding over the next 50 years as a result of climate change, new modeling from Oregon State University indicates. This web site provides streamflow information for the Columbia River and coastal drainages in Washington and Oregon State for the 21st century based on a large number of climate scenarios and model experiments. These results point to extensive, landscape-scale transformations in hydrologic behaviour associated with climate change. 5 Examples of summary plots for monthly snow water equivalent (SWE) (mm) (averaged over the upstream basin area) and raw streamflow not adjusted for bias (cubic metres per second) for the Skagit River at Mount Vernon. Until recently, a climate-change induced shift in water supply was the story of the Columbia River Basin's future. The PET is shown to increase dramatically over most of the domain (primarily because of warming in the scenarios), whereas AET shows widespread declines east of the Cascade Range. This has prompted the National Weather Service to issue a winter weather advisory for the Tri-Cities, Walla Walla, Hermiston, and surrounding areas in effect from 04:00 to 22:00 Sunday. It is important to acknowledge that opinions differ on the utility or even possibility of improving ensembles of future projections based on the ability to simulate the past climate (e.g., Gleckler, Taylor, & Doutriaux, Citation2008). The CBCCSP was developed to address these diverse needs. unpublished manuscript). Flooding in these basins is sensitive to both warming (which raises snow lines and effectively enlarges the contributing basin area during most flood events) and increasing winter precipitation. Right panel: Historical and projected future watershed classification (rain-dominant, transitional (mixed-rain-and-snow), snow-dominant) for 10-digit Hydrologic Unit Code watersheds, based on the long-term mean of the SWE2PR for each watershed. Prior climate change datasets for the CRB produced by CIG (using CMIP2/TAR projections) only included about 20 river sites (e.g., NWPCC, Citation2005; Snover et al., Citation2003) and provided very limited support for planning efforts at smaller spatial scales. The DOI via the USFWS has recently established a set of LCCs across the United States (USFWS, Citation2013) and has generated additional funding to support a group of regional CSCs, one of which was recently established in the PNW (PNWCSC), combining the efforts of about 15 PNW research universities, jointly led by the USGS, Oregon State University, the UW, and the University of Idaho. Other impacts, such as changes in soil moisture dynamics are also apparent in the simulations. Each of these methods has its specific advantages and limitations (as discussed in detail in Hamlet et al., 2010a); however, the HD method combines several important strengths of the CD and BCSD methods and was developed specifically to support the prediction of daily hydrologic extremes (Hamlet et al., 2010a).