Climate Change Impacts on Precipitation Extremes over the Columbia River Basin Based on Downscaled CMIP 5 Climate Scenarios

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Dars, Ghulam Hussain
Copyright Year	2018
Abstract	Hydro-climate extreme analysis helps understanding the process of spatiotemporal variation of extreme events due to climate change, and it is an important aspect in designing hydrological structures, forecasting floods and an effective decision making in the field of water resources design and management. The study evaluates extreme precipitation events over the Columbia River Basin (CRB), the fourth largest basin in the U.S., by simulating four CMIP5 global climate models (GCMs) for the historical period (1970-1999) and future period (2041-2070) under RCP85 GHG scenario. We estimated the intensity of extreme and average precipitation for both winter (DJF) and summer (JJA) seasons by using the GEV distribution and multi-model ensemble average over the domain of the Columbia River Basin. The four CMIP5 models performed very well at simulating precipitation extremes in the winter season. The CMIP5 climate models showed heterogeneous spatial pattern of summer extreme precipitation over the CRB for the future period. It was noticed that multi-model ensemble mean outperformed compared to the individual performance of climate models for both seasons. We have found that the multi-model ensemble shows a consistent and significant increase in the extreme precipitation events in the west of the Cascades Range, Coastal Ranges of Oregon and Washington State, the Canadian portion of the basin and over the Rocky Mountains. However, the mean precipitation is projected to decrease in both winter and summer seasons in the future period.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1978&context=open_access_etds&httpsredir=1&referer=
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article