Analysis of Extreme Events in Regional Climate Model Simulations for the Pacific Northwest using weatherathome

One of the most prominent impacts of climate change over the Pacific Northwest is the potential for an elevated number of extreme precipitation events over the region. Planning for natural hazards such as increasing number of floods related to high-precipitation events have, in general, focused on avoiding development in floodplains and conditioning development to withstand inundation with a minimum of losses. Nationwide, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates that about one quarter of its payments cover damage that has occurred outside mapped floodplains. It is clear that traditional flood-based planning will not be sufficient to predict and avoid future losses resulting from climate-related hazards such as high-precipitation events. In order to address this problem, the present study employs regional climate model output for future climate change scenarios to aid with the development of a map-based inventory of future hazard risks that can contribute to the development of a "planning-scale" decision support system for the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD). Climate model output is derived from the climateprediction.net (CPDN) weatherathome project, an innovative climate science experiment that utilizes volunteer computers from users worldwide to produce hundreds of thousands superensembles of regional climate simulations of the Western United States climate from 1950 to 2050. The spatial and temporal distribution of extreme weather events are analyzed for the Pacific Northwest to diagnose the model's capabilities as an input for map products such as impacts on hydrology. Special attention is given to intensity and frequency of Atmospheric River events in historical and future climate contexts.