Abstract. Water resources in cold regions in western Canada face severe risks posed by anthropogenic global warming as evapotranspiration increases and precipitation regimes shift. Although understanding the water cycle is key for addressing climate change issues, it is difficult to obtain high spatial- and temporal-resolution observations of hydroclimatic processes, especially in remote regions. Climate models are useful tools for dissecting and diagnosing these processes, especially the convection-permitting (CP) high-resolution regional climate simulation, which provides advantages over lower-resolution models by explicitly representing convection. In addition to better representing convective systems, higher spatial resolution also better represents topography, mountain meteorology, and highly heterogeneous geophysical features. However, there is little work with convection-permitting regional climate models conducted over western Canada. Focusing on the Mackenzie River and Saskatchewan River basins, this study investigated the surface water budget and atmospheric moisture balance in historical and representative concentration pathway (RCP8.5) projections using 4 km CP Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF). We compared the high-resolution 4 km CP WRF and three common reanalysis datasets, namely the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR), the Japanese 55-year Reanalysis (JRA-55), and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts reanalysis interim dataset (ERA-Interim). High-resolution WRF outperforms the reanalyses in balancing the surface water budget in both river basins with much lower residual terms. For the pseudo-global-warming scenario at the end of the 21st century with representative concentration pathway (RCP8.5) radiative forcing, both the Mackenzie River and Saskatchewan River basins show increases in the amplitude for precipitation and evapotranspiration and a decrease in runoff. The Saskatchewan River basin (SRB) shows a moderate increase in precipitation in the west and a small decrease in the east. Combined with a significant increase in evapotranspiration in a warmer climate, the Saskatchewan River basin would have a larger deficit of water resources than in the current climate based on the pseudo-global-warming (PGW) simulation. The high-resolution simulation also shows that the difference of atmospheric water vapour balance in the two river basins is due to flow orientation and topography differences at the western boundaries of the two basins. The sensitivity of water vapour balance to fine-scale topography and atmospheric processes shown in this study demonstrates that high-resolution dynamical downscaling is important for large-scale water balance and hydrological cycles.

Abstract. To assess the hydroclimatic risks posed by climate change in western Canada, this study conducted a retrospective simulation (CTL) and a pseudo-global warming (PGW) dynamical downscaling of future warming projection under RCP8.5 from an ensemble of CMIP5 climate model projections using a convection-permitting 4-km Weather Research Forecasting (WRF) model. The convection-permitting resolution of the model avoids the error-prone convection parameterization by explicitly resolving cumulus plumes. The evaluation of surface air temperature by the retrospective simulation WRF-CTL against a gridded observation ANUSPLIN shows that WRF simulation of daily mean temperature agrees well with ANUSPLIN temperature in terms of the geographical distribution of cold biases east of the Canadian Rockies, especially in spring. Compared with the observed precipitation from ANUSPLIN and CaPA, the WRF-CTL simulation captures the main pattern of distribution, but with a wet bias seen in higher precipitation near the British Columbia coast in winter and over the immediate region on the lee side of the Canadian Rockies. The PGW simulation shows more warming than CTL, especially over the polar region in the northeast, during the cold season, and in daily minimum temperature. Precipitation changes in PGW over CTL vary with the seasons: In spring and late fall for both basins, precipitation is shown to increase, whereas in summer in the Saskatchewan River Basin, it either shows no increase or decreases, with less summer precipitation shown in PGW than in CTL for some parts of the Prairies. This seasonal difference in precipitation change suggests that in summer the Canadian Prairies and the southern Boreal Forest biomes will likely see a slight decline in precipitation minus evapotranspiration, which might impact soil moisture for farming and forest fires. With almost no increase in summer precipitation and much more evapotranspiration in PGW than in CTL, the water availability during the growing season will be challenging for the Canadian Prairies. WRF-PGW shows an increase of high-intensity precipitation events and shifts the distribution of precipitation events toward more extremely intensive events in all seasons, as current moderate events become extreme events with more vapor loading, especially in summer. Due to this shift in precipitation intensity to the higher end in the PGW simulation, the seemingly moderate increase in the total amount of precipitation in summer for both the Mackenzie and Saskatchewan river basins may not reflect the real change in flooding risk and water availability for agriculture. The high-resolution downscaled climate simulations provide abundant opportunities both for investigating local-scale atmospheric dynamics and for studying climate impacts in hydrology, agriculture, and ecosystems. The change in the probability distribution of precipitation intensity also calls for innovative bias-correction methods to be developed for the application of the dataset when bias-correction is required.

Abstract. Water resources in cold regions in western Canada face severe risks posed by anthropogenic global warming as evapotranspiration increases and precipitation regimes shift. Although understanding the water cycle is key in addressing climate change issues, it is difficult to obtain high spatial and temporal resolution observations of hydroclimatic processes, especially in remote regions. Climate models are useful tools for dissecting and diagnosing these processes, especially, convection-permitting (CP) high-resolution regional climate simulation provides advantages over lower-resolution models by explicitly representing convection. In addition to better representing convective systems, higher spatial resolution also better represents topography and mountain meteorology, and highly heterogeneous geophysical features. However, there is little work with convection-permitting regional climate models conducted over western Canada. Focusing on the Mackenzie and Saskatchewan river basins, this study investigated the surface water budget and atmospheric moisture balance in historical and RCP8.5 projections using 4-km CP Weather Research and Forecast (WRF). We compared the high-resolution 4-km CP WRF and three common reanalysis datasets: NARR, JRA-55, and ERA-Interim. High-resolution WRF out-performs the reanalyses in balancing the surface water budget in both river basins with much lower residual terms. For the pseudo-global warming scenario at the end of the 21st century with RCP8.5 radiative forcing, both the Mackenzie and Saskatchewan river basins show increases in the amplitude for precipitation and evapotranspiration and a decrease in runoff. The Saskatchewan river basin shows a moderate increase of precipitation in the west and a small decrease in the east. Combined with a significant increase of evapotranspiration in a warmer climate, the Saskatchewan river basin would have a larger deficit of water resources than in the current climate based on the PGW simulation. The high-resolution simulation also shows the difference of atmospheric water vapour balance in the two river basins is due to flow orientation and topography differences at the western boundaries of the two basins. The sensitivity of water vapour balance to fine-scale topography and atmospheric processes shown in this study demonstrates that high-resolution dynamical downscaling is important for large-scale water balance and hydrological cycles.

Abstract. Climate change poses great risks to western Canada's ecosystem and socioeconomical development. To assess these hydroclimatic risks under high-end emission scenario RCP8.5, this study used the Weather Research Forecasting (WRF) model at a convection-permitting (CP) 4 km resolution to dynamically downscale the mean projection of a 19-member CMIP5 ensemble by the end of the 21st century. The CP simulations include a retrospective simulation (CTL, 2000–2015) for verification forced by ERA-Interim and a pseudo-global warming (PGW) for climate change projection forced with climate change forcing (2071–2100 to 1976–2005) from CMIP5 ensemble added on ERA-Interim. The retrospective WRF-CTL's surface air temperature simulation was evaluated against Canadian daily analysis ANUSPLIN, showing good agreements in the geographical distribution with cold biases east of the Canadian Rockies, especially in spring. WRF-CTL captures the main pattern of observed precipitation distribution from CaPA and ANUSPLIN but shows a wet bias near the British Columbia coast in winter and over the immediate region on the lee side of the Canadian Rockies. The WRF-PGW simulation shows significant warming relative to CTL, especially over the polar region in the northeast during the cold season, and in daily minimum temperature. Precipitation changes in PGW over CTL vary with the seasons: in spring and late autumn precipitation increases in most areas, whereas in summer in the Saskatchewan River basin and southern Canadian Prairies, the precipitation change is negligible or decreased slightly. With almost no increase in precipitation and much more evapotranspiration in the future, the water availability during the growing season will be challenging for the Canadian Prairies. The WRF-PGW projected warming is less than that by the CMIP5 ensemble in all seasons. The CMIP5 ensemble projects a 10 %–20 % decrease in summer precipitation over the Canadian Prairies and generally agrees with WRF-PGW except for regions with significant terrain. This difference may be due to the much higher resolution of WRF being able to more faithfully represent small-scale summer convection and orographic lifting due to steep terrain. WRF-PGW shows an increase in high-intensity precipitation events and shifts the distribution of precipitation events toward more extremely intensive events in all seasons. Due to this shift in precipitation intensity to the higher end in the PGW simulation, the seemingly moderate increase in the total amount of precipitation in summer east of the Canadian Rockies may underestimate the increase in flooding risk and water shortage for agriculture. The change in the probability distribution of precipitation intensity also calls for innovative bias-correction methods to be developed for the application of the dataset when bias correction is required. High-quality meteorological observation over the region is needed for both forcing high-resolution climate simulation and conducting verification. The high-resolution downscaled climate simulations provide abundant opportunities both for investigating local-scale atmospheric dynamics and for studying climate impacts on hydrology, agriculture, and ecosystems.

Abstract. Drought is a recurring extreme climate event and among the most costly natural disasters in the world. This is particularly true over Canada, where drought is both a frequent and damaging phenomenon with impacts on regional water resources, agriculture, industry, aquatic ecosystems, and health. However, nationwide drought assessments are currently lacking and impacted by limited ground-based observations. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of historical droughts over the whole of Canada, including the role of large-scale teleconnections. Drought events are characterized by the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) over various temporal scales (1, 3, 6, and 12 consecutive months, 6 months from April to September, and 12 months from October to September) applied to different gridded monthly data sets for the period 1950–2013. The Mann–Kendall test, rotated empirical orthogonal function, continuous wavelet transform, and wavelet coherence analyses are used, respectively, to investigate the trend, spatio-temporal patterns, periodicity, and teleconnectivity of drought events. Results indicate that southern (northern) parts of the country experienced significant trends towards drier (wetter) conditions although substantial variability exists. Two spatially well-defined regions with different temporal evolution of droughts were identified – the Canadian Prairies and northern central Canada. The analyses also revealed the presence of a dominant periodicity of between 8 and 32 months in the Prairie region and between 8 and 40 months in the northern central region. These cycles of low-frequency variability are found to be associated principally with the Pacific–North American (PNA) and Multivariate El Niño/Southern Oscillation Index (MEI) relative to other considered large-scale climate indices. This study is the first of its kind to identify dominant periodicities in drought variability over the whole of Canada in terms of when the drought events occur, their duration, and how often they occur.

Abstract. Drought is a recurring extreme climate event and among the most costly natural disasters in the world. This is particularly true over Canada, where drought is both a frequent and damaging phenomenon with impacts on regional water resources, agriculture, industry, aquatic ecosystems and health. However, nation-wide drought assessments are currently lacking and impacted by limited ground-based observations. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of historical droughts over the whole of Canada, including the role of large-scale teleconnections. Drought events are characterized by the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) over various temporal scales (1, 3, 6, and 12 consecutive months, 6 months from April to September, and 12 months from October to September) applied to different gridded monthly data sets for the period 1950–2013. The Mann Kendall test, Rotated Empirical Orthogonal Function, Continuous Wavelet Transform, and Wavelet Coherence analyses are used, respectively, to investigate the trend, spatiotemporal patterns, periodicity, and teleconnectivity of drought events. Results indicate that southern (northern) parts of the country experienced significant trends towards drier (wetter) conditions although substantial variability exists. Two spatially well-defined regions with different temporal evolution of droughts were identified―the Canadian Prairies and Northern-central Canada. The analyses also revealed the presence of a dominant periodicity of between 8–32 months in the Prairie region, and 8–40 months in the Northern central region. These cycles of low-frequency variability are found to be associated principally to the Pacific-North American (PNA) and Multivariate El Niño/Southern Oscillation Index (MEI) relative to other considered large-scale climate indices. This study is the first of its kind to identify dominant periodicities in drought variability over the whole of Canada in terms of when the drought events occur, the duration, and how often they do so.

Abstract A devastating, flood-producing rainstorm occurred over southern Alberta, Canada, from 19 to 22 June 2013. The long-lived, heavy rainfall event was a result of complex interplays between topographic, synoptic, and convective processes that rendered an accurate simulation of this event a challenging task. In this study, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model was used to simulate this event and was validated against several observation datasets. Both the timing and location of the model precipitation agree closely with the observations, indicating that the WRF Model is capable of reproducing this type of severe event. Sensitivity tests with different microphysics schemes were conducted and evaluated using equitable threat and bias frequency scores. The WRF double-moment 6-class microphysics scheme (WDM6) generally performed better when compared with other schemes. The application of a conventional convective/stratiform separation algorithm shows that convective activity was dominant during the early stages, then evolved into predominantly stratiform precipitation later in the event. The HYSPLIT back-trajectory analysis and regional water budget assessments using WRF simulation output suggest that the moisture for the precipitation was mainly from recycling antecedent soil moisture through evaporation and evapotranspiration over the Canadian Prairies and the U.S. Great Plains. This analysis also shows that a small fraction of the moisture can be traced back to the northeastern Pacific, and direct uptake from the Gulf of Mexico was not a significant source in this event.