Analysis of future climate change impacts on snow distribution over mountainous watersheds in Northern California by means of a physically-based snow distribution model

Date

2018-12-01

Author

Ishida, K.
Ercan, Ali
Trinh, T.
Kavvas, M. L.
Ohara, N.
Carr, K.
Anderson, M. L.

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

125
views

0
downloads

The impacts of climate change on snow distribution through the 21st century were investigated over three mountainous watersheds in Northern California by means of a physically-based snow distribution model. The future climate conditions during a 90-year future period from water year 2010 to 2100 were obtained from 13 future climate projection realizations from two GCMs (ECHAM5 and CCSM3) based on four SRES scenarios (A1B, A1FI, A2, and B1). The 13 future climate projection realizations were dynamically downscaled at 9 km resolution by a regional climate model. Using the downscaled variables based on the 13 future climate projection realizations, snow distribution over the Feather, Yuba, and American River watersheds (FRW, YRW, and ARW) was projected by means of the physically-based snow model. FRW and YRW watersheds cover the main source areas of the California StateWater Project (SWP), and ARW is one of the key watersheds in the California Central Valley Project (CVP). SWP and CVP are of great importance as they provide and regulate much of the California's water for drinking, irrigation, flood control, environmental, and hydro-power generation purposes. Ensemble average snow distribution over the study watersheds was calculated over the 13 realizations and for each scenario, revealing differences among the scenarios. While the snow reduction through the 21st century was similar between A1B and A2, the snow reduction was milder for B1, and more severe for A1FI. A significant downward trend was detected in the snowpack over nearly the entire watershed areas for all the ensemble average results. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Subject Keywords

Snow distribution, Future climate projections, Physically-based snow model, Dynamical downscaling, SIERRA-NEVADA, PRECIPITATION, TEMPERATURE, EVENT, LEVEL, 20TH-CENTURY, SIMULATIONS, SENSITIVITY, RESOURCES, RUNOFF

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/100739

Journal

SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.07.250

Collections

Department of Civil Engineering, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Impacts of climate change on snow accumulation and melting processes over mountainous regions in Northern California during the 21st century Ishida, K.; Ohara, N.; Ercan, Ali; Jang, S.; Trinh, T.; Kavvas, M. L.; Carr, K.; Anderson, M. L. (2019-10-01) A point-location-based analysis of future climate change impacts on snow accumulation and melting processes was conducted over three study watersheds in Northern California during a 90-year future period by means of snow regime projections. The snow regime projections were obtained by means of a physically-based snow model with dynamically downscaled future climate projections. Then, atmospheric and snow-related variables, and their interrelations during the 21st century were investigated to reveal future c...
Trend analysis of watershed-scale annual and seasonal precipitation in Northern California based on dynamically downscaled future climate projections Ishida, K.; Ercan, Ali; Trinh, T.; Jang, S.; Kavvas, M. L.; Ohara, N.; Chen, Z. Q.; Kure, S.; Dib, A. (2020-03-01) Impact of future climate change on watershed-scale precipitation was investigated over Northern California based on future climate projections by means of the dynamical downscaling approach. Thirteen different future climate projection realizations from two general circulation models (GCMs: ECHAM5 and CCSM3) based on four emission scenarios (SRES A1B, A1FI, A2, and B1) were dynamically downscaled to 9-km resolution grids over eight watersheds in Northern California for a period of 90 water years (2010-2100)...
Trend analysis of watershed-scale precipitation over Northern California by means of dynamically-downscaled CMIP5 future climate projections Ishida, K.; Gorguner, M.; Ercan, Ali; Trinh, T.; Kavvas, M. L. (2017-08-01) The impacts of climate change on watershed-scale precipitation through the 21st century were investigated over eight study watersheds in Northern California based on dynamically downscaled CMIP5 future climate projections from three GCMs (CCSM4, HadGEM2-ES, and MIROC5) under the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 future climate scenarios. After evaluating the modeling capability of the WRF model, the six future climate projections were dynamically downscaled by means of the WRF model over Northern California at 9 km grid re...
Special issue on remote sensing of snow and its applications Arslan, Ali Nadir; Akyürek, Sevda Zuhal (2019-06-01) Snow cover is an essential climate variable directly affecting the Earth's energy balance. Snow cover has a number of important physical properties that exert an influence on global and regional energy, water, and carbon cycles. Remote sensing provides a good understanding of snow cover and enable snow cover information to be assimilated into hydrological, land surface, meteorological, and climate models for predicting snowmelt runoff, snow water resources, and to warn about snow-related natural hazards. Th...
Identifying impacts of climate change on water resources using CMIP6 simulations: Havran basin case Çaktu, Yasemin; Yücel, İsmail; Fıstıkoğlu, Okan; Department of Earth System Science (2022-9-2) This study aims to investigate climate change effect on precipitation, temperature and discharge in Havran basin which has thousands of decares of agricultural lands. Changes in precipitation and temperature were determined using 10 global climate models (GCMs) for total precipitation and 13 GCMs for average temperature from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) for the historical period, SSP2-4.5 (moderate-case) and SSP5-8.5 (worst-case) scenarios. Both station observations and ERA5-Land re...

Citation Formats

K. Ishida et al., “Analysis of future climate change impacts on snow distribution over mountainous watersheds in Northern California by means of a physically-based snow distribution model,” SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT, vol. 645, pp. 1065–1082, 2018, Accessed: 00, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/100739.