Mountains, Climate Change and North American Water Security

The juxtaposition of cold high precipitation catchments in mountains and low precipitation in downstream lowlands means that mountain water supplies support over half the world's population and sustain most irrigation agriculture. How secure is this mountain water in northern North America? Irrigation and other consumptive downstream uses have put immense pressure on water supplied from the Canadian Rockies. Excess water from these rivers also carries risk. Downstream communities are often located in the flood plains of mountain rivers, making them subject to the extreme hydrometeorology of the headwaters as was evident in the BC/Alberta/Saskatchewan floods of 2013 and droughts of 2015/2016. Climate change is disproportionately warming high mountain areas and the impacts of warming on water are magnified in high mountains because seasonal snowpacks, perennial snowfields and glaciers form important stores of water and control the timing of release of water and the seasonal and annual discharge of major mountain rivers. Changes in mountain snow and glacial regimes are rapidly occurring in Western Canada and this is already impacting downstream water security by changing flood risk, streamflow timing and volume. Hydrological process modelling is diagnosing the causes of intensification of hydrological cycling and coupled to climate models suggesting that the timing and quantity of mountain waters will shift under certain climate, glacier cover and forest cover scenarios and so impact the water security of downstream food production. So far, changes in precipitation are matched by evapotranspiration and sublimation providing some resilience to change in streamflow due to intensification of hydrological cycling. Faster glacier melt in drought periods has buffered low flows but this capacity id dwindling as glaciers ablate. The International Network for Alpine Research Catchment Hydrology (INARCH) project of GEWEX is quantifying water resiliency and risk in mountain headwaters so as to better assess the water security of downstream regions. INARCH results from Western Canada suggest current mountain river resiliency is at risk from increased climate variability as rainfall runoff replaces snowmelt and glacier melt runoff processes.