Document Type

Post-Print

Publication Date

10-2017

Subjects

Climatic changes -- Oregon -- Hydrological aspects, Willamette River (Or.) -- Effect of climatic change on, Drought -- Forecasting

Abstract

The changing climate and the associated future increases in temperature are expected to have impacts on drought characteristics and hydrologic cycle. This paper investigates the projected changes in spatiotemporal characteristics of droughts and their future attributes over the Willamette River Basin (WRB) in the Pacific Northwest U.S. The analysis is performed using two subsets of downscaled CMIP5 global climate models (GCMs) each consisting of 10 models from two future scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) for 30 years of historical period (1970–1999) and 90 years of future projections (2010–2099). Hydrologic modeling is conducted using the Precipitation Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) as a robust distributed hydrologic model with lower computational cost compared to other models. Meteorological and hydrological droughts are studied using three drought indices (i.e. Standardized Precipitation Index, Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index, Standardized Streamflow Index). Results reveal that the intensity and duration of hydrological droughts are expected to increase over the WRB, albeit the annual precipitation is expected to increase. On the other hand, the intensity of meteorological droughts do not indicate an aggravation for most cases. We explore the changes of hydrometeolorogical variables over the basin in order to understand the causes for such differences and to discover the controlling factors of drought. Furthermore, the uncertainty of projections are quantified for model, scenario, and downscaling uncertainty.

Description

© 2017. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Hydrology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Hydrology, 553, (October 2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2017.08.047

DOI

10.1016/j.jhydrol.2017.08.047

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/22116

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