Water Allocation Challenges of South Saskatchewan River Basin under the Combined Impacts of Climate Change and El Niño Southern Oscillation
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 142, Issue 10
Abstract
The outlook and future water resources management of the South Saskatchewan River Basin (SSRB) in Alberta, Canada, under the potential combined impact of climate change and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), has been assessed using the water resources management model (WRMM) of Alberta Environment and Parks. The potential combined impact of climate change on the SSRB water management is simulated by WRMM on the basis of the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) climate scenarios of the 2040–2069 (2050s) projected by general circulation models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), together with an active El Niño or La Niña. From results obtained for this study, license holders of the SSRB categorized under district irrigation, junior and future private irrigation, and senior, junior, and future nonirrigation consumptive user groups could be either more or less affected, depending on whether the active climate anomaly will be El Niño or La Niña, than by the impact of climate change alone.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Tom Tang and Kent Berg (now retired) of Alberta Environment and Parks, and Bob Riewe and Bob Winter of Alberta Agriculture Forestry for their advice and data throughout the study. The first author was partly supported by an Alberta Innovates Graduate Student Scholarship, Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and graduate teaching assistantships of the University of Alberta. The SRES climate change scenarios data were downloaded from Canadian Climate Change Scenarios Network website (http://cccsn.ca/), and ERA-40 reanalysis data were taken from the ECMWF Data Server (http://data-portal.ecmwf.int/).
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 142 • Issue 10 • October 2016
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 5, 2016
Accepted: Mar 18, 2016
Published online: Jun 9, 2016
Published in print: Oct 1, 2016
Discussion open until: Nov 9, 2016
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