Impacts of Regional Climate Model Spatial Resolution on Summer Flood Simulation

9 pages•Published: September 20, 2018

Mariana Castaneda-Gonzalez, Annie Poulin, Rabindranarth Romero-Lopez, Richard Arsenault, François Brissette, Diane Chaumont and Dominique Paquin

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate the impact of the Canadian Regional Climate Model’s (CRCM) spatial resolution on summer floods simulation. Four different climate simulations issued from the fourth version of the CRCM (two driven by the Canadian General Circulation Model (CGCM) and two driven by the ERA40c reanalysis) are employed. One simulation at 45 km resolution and another one at 15km resolution for each driver were compared on a daily time-step for the 1960-1990 period. These four simulations are used as inputs for two hydrological models of varying complexity (HSAMI and MOHYSE). Each model is calibrated using three different objective functions based on the Kling-Gupta Efficiency criterion (KGE) to target floods. Two seasonal indices are used to evaluate the CRCM outputs: bias (temperature) and relative bias (precipitation). For the streamflow simulations analysis, the seasonal values of KGE and relative bias are used. The results show an impact of spatial resolution on climate model outputs, on streamflow simulation and flood indicators in the hydrological models. However, other elements such as climate model driver and domain size can influence the results, highlighting the need for further research to assess the impact of spatial resolution on summer floods.

Keyphrases: crcm, floods, hsami, mohyse, return periods, spatial resolution

In: Goffredo La Loggia, Gabriele Freni, Valeria Puleo and Mauro De Marchis (editors). HIC 2018. 13th International Conference on Hydroinformatics, vol 3, pages 372-380.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/mgK3
	https://doi.org/10.29007/hd8l

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{HIC2018:Impacts_Regional_Climate_Model,
  author    = {Mariana Castaneda-Gonzalez and Annie Poulin and Rabindranarth Romero-Lopez and Richard Arsenault and François Brissette and Diane Chaumont and Dominique Paquin},
  title     = {Impacts of Regional Climate Model Spatial Resolution on Summer Flood Simulation},
  booktitle = {HIC 2018. 13th International Conference on Hydroinformatics},
  editor    = {Goffredo La Loggia and Gabriele Freni and Valeria Puleo and Mauro De Marchis},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Engineering},
  volume    = {3},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2516-2330},
  url       = {/publications/paper/mgK3},
  doi       = {10.29007/hd8l},
  pages     = {372-380},
  year      = {2018}}

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