Modeling the Potential Impacts of Climate Change on a Small Watershed in Labrador, Canada

Hydroelectric power producers are strongly dependent on the climate to deliver the fuel necessary to generate electricity. This fuel source is watershed runoff, which is manifested as the balance between components of the climate system, primarily precipitation and evapotranspiration. Climate change threatens to alter global hydrological regimes and impacts need to be assessed to determine production vulnerabilities and opportunities. In this paper, dynamically downscaled regional climate models from the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) are combined with statistical bias correction techniques to generate 30-year time series of temperature and precipitation for a base period (1980s) and a future period (2050s). These time series are transformed into streamflow using the WATFLOOD hydrological model that has been calibrated for a sub-basin of the Churchill River. Results are consistent with IPCC results and show increasing mean annual streamflow of approximately 9% between the base and future periods with larger increases in winter runoff and little or no change during late summer and fall. Inter-model comparison and probabilistic methods are used to provide further insight into simulation results.

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