Options for Improving Climate Modeling to Assist Water Utility ...

Water Utility Climate Alliance White Paper
Options for Improving Climate Modeling to Assist Water Utility Planning for Climate Change
Develop statistical downscaling tools that can be applied to RCM output. Ideally, a wide
variety of statistical downscaling techniques would be applied, and the locations and
variables for which they are developed would prioritize the requirements for water
utilities’ decision aids.
Adapt approaches for quantifying uncertainty and scientists’ confidence in the robustness
of regional climate changes.
Archive the datasets generated above in a manner that encourages access. Local
projections would require an archive that is web-accessible, has large bandwidth, and
permits extraction of probabilistic data as well as data from individual projections for
single or multiple points [aspects of this type of access have been nicely prototyped by
the LLNL-Reclamation-SCU downscaled climate projections derived from the WCRP’s
CMIP3 multimodel dataset, stored and served at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory (LLNL) Green Data Oasis]. Full output from RCMs simulations should be
stored but not necessarily accessible in the way envisioned for local projections in order
to control bandwidth.
Pros
Scientists will be able to communicate more effectively their confidence in local
projections. The ensemble of regional simulations will allow them to understand what
aspects of regional climate change are insensitive to model design, emissions scenario,
and climate variability and to examine climate change in the context of variables not yet
analyzed.
Water utility planners (and the general public) will have an archive of local projections
that will allow them to select climate change scenarios based upon their management
strategies, including novel approaches that may not yet be used widely in practice.
Water utility planners will have a voice in the design of regional climate change scenarios
and the data archive, including such elements as land-use scenarios for regional
simulations.
Water utilities will have an ongoing dialogue with climate change scientists and
statisticians that will enable a more thorough understanding of how climate change
datasets are created, how they may be used, and how to access them.
This effort will establish the infrastructure needed to update climate projections as
climate modeling continues to become refined. If organized quickly, it could center on
the CMIP5 data release that is tentatively planned for 2011.
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