Description

High resolution ensembles of hydroclimate projections are useful for climate and water resources adaptation planning and many of these datasets exist over United States focused domains specifically the Contiguous United States (CONUS). However, very few century-long, high-resolution hydroclimate projections exist over Alaska and Hawai’i and no statewide projections including hydrology exist. This motivated us to develop a dataset consisting of multiple statistically downscaled climate model projections and corresponding off-line hydrologic model simulations to obtain hydrologic simulations from 1950 to 2099 over the two domains, which fills a critical gap in hydroclimate projection capabilities for these two under-served regions. We take an approach similar to previous CONUS hydrologic assessments where we: 1) select climate model outputs based on CMIP5 Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 and 8.5; 2) perform statistical downscaling to generate high-resolution climate input data for hydrologic models (12-km grid-spacing for Alaska and 1-km for Hawai’i); and 3) perform off-line hydrologic model simulations, using the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model. A notable difference in the hydrologic model configuration from CONUS to this case, is the use of full water-energy balance computation with a simple glacier model for Alaska. Overall, the simulations in Hawai’i show large uncertainty in total runoff driven by large variability in precipitation among the GCMs used for this study. Robust warming and increases in precipitation produce runoff increases for most of Alaska. However, runoff is likely to decrease in current glacierized areas in southeast Alaska.

We request that you cite the dataset as:

Mizukami, N., A. J. Newman, A. W. Wood, E. D. Gutmann, and J. J. Hamman, 2022: 21st century hydrologic projections for Alaska and Hawai’i. Boulder, CO: UCAR/NCAR/RAL. doi: https://doi.org/10.5065/c3kn-2y77

A corresponding publication describing the modeling methodologies, summary characteristics, data set limitations, and example uses is available:

Mizukami, N., A. J. Newman, J. S. Littell, T. W. Giambelluca, A. W. Wood, E. D. Gutmann, J. J. Hamman, D. R. Gergel, B. Nijssen, M. P. Clark, and J. R. Arnold, 2022: New projections of 21st century climate and hydrology for Alaska and Hawai’i. Climate Services, In review.

For additional details, please see the Readme file located under Download Options below.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5065/c3kn-2y77

Authors

N. Mizukami
A. J. Newman
A. W. Wood
E. D. Gutmann
J. J. Hamman

Resource Support Contacts

Andrew J. Newman
UCAR/NCAR - Research Applications Laboratory
anewman@ucar.edu

Media Types

application/pdf (Portable Document Format)

Download Options

Child Datasets