Predicting Hydrological Change in an Alpine Glacierized Basin and Its Sensitivity to Landscape Evolution and Meteorological Forcings
Date
2023-08-20
Authors
Aubry-Wake, Caroline
Pomeroy, John W.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Wiley
ORCID
Type
Article
Degree Level
Abstract
Shifting precipitation patterns, a warming climate, changing snow dynamics and retreating glaciers are occurring simultaneously in glacierized mountain headwaters. To predict future hydrological behavior in an exemplar glacierized basin, a spatially distributed, physically based cold regions process hydrological model including on and off-glacier process representations was applied to the Peyto Glacier Research Basin in the Canadian Rockies. The model was forced with bias-corrected outputs from a high-resolution Weather and Research Forecasting (WRF-PGW) atmospheric simulation for 2000–2015, and under pseudo-global warming for 2085–2100 under a business-as-usual climate change scenario. The simulations show that the end-of-century increase in precipitation nearly compensates for the decreased ice melt associated with almost complete deglaciation, resulting in a decrease in annual streamflow of 7%. However, the timing of streamflow advances drastically, with peak flow shifting from July to June, and August streamflow dropping by 68%. To examine the sensitivity of future hydrology to possible future drainage basin biophysical attributes, the end-of-century simulations were run under a range of initial conditions and parameters and showed the highest sensitivity to initial ice volume and surface water storage capacity. This comprehensive examination suggests that hydrological compensation between declining icemelt and increasing rainfall and snowmelt runoff as well as between deglaciation and increasing basin depressional storage capacity play important roles in determining future streamflow in a rapidly deglaciating high-mountain environment. Conversely, afforestation and soil development had relatively smaller impacts on future hydrology
Description
Hydrometeorological data measured in the PGRB is available from the Federated Research Data Repository under licenses CC BY 4.0 (Pradhananga et al., 2020) and is described in (Pradhananga et al., 2021). The WRF model outputs is from (Li et al., 2019) and is available on the Global Water Futures data portal: http://cuizinart.io (last accessed 06 March 2023). Glacier mass balance for the Peyto Glacier is available from (WGMS, 2021) under license CC BY 4.0 (last accessed 06 March 2023). The CRHM model is available through (Pomeroy et al., 2022) under a GPLV3 license and the model code, manual, and related publications can be found here: https://research-groups.usask.ca/hydrology/modelling/crhm.php. The model input files and analysis codes for this study are available at (Aubry-Wake, 2023). This includes the CRHM parameters and forcings time series.
Keywords
Predicted streamflow volume is highly sensitive to glacier cover, but streamflow variability is more sensitive to water storage capacity, Increases in future precipitation will nearly compensate for deglaciation impacts on streamflow volume in the Peyto Glacier Research Basin, Future streamflow will be dominated by snowmelt and rainfall, modulated by depressional storage and will occur much earlier in the year
Citation
Aubry-Wake, C., & Pomeroy, J. W. (2023). Predicting hydrological change in an alpine glacierized basin and its sensitivity to landscape evolution and meteorological forcings. Water Resources Research, 59(9), e2022WR033363. DOI: 10.1029/2022WR033363
Degree
Department
Program
Advisor
Committee
Citation
Aubry-Wake, C., & Pomeroy, J. W. (2023). Predicting hydrological change in an alpine glacierized basin and its sensitivity to landscape evolution and meteorological forcings. Water Resources Research, 59(9), e2022WR033363. DOI: 10.1029/2022WR033363
Part Of
item.page.relation.ispartofseries
DOI
10.1029/2022WR033363