Using Future streamflow to inform Decision-making efforts in Arctic River systems

Climate change is leading to substantial shifts in the Arctic climate system, and these shifts are causing changes in extreme event behavior in frequency, intensity, and duration at regional scales. These changes are generating new concerns for local communities and decision-makers who are tasked with understanding and planning for extreme events. Proactive land and resource management requires an understanding of potential risk factors sometimes decades in advance; something that has been a challenge under changing climate conditions. Extreme events often act as design and planning limitations, but in order to identify those extremes going forward, it requires modeling the potential outcomes of climate driven changes in local environments to be able to communicate the risk associated with those events, as well as to identify potential uncertainties. Focused on interior Alaska river systems, this project applies dynamically downscaled forcing data to project shifts in future streamflow in the next 50 years to better understand risks to current and planned critical infrastructure and environmental systems. Using WRF forcing data for interior Alaska, the WRF-Hydro model is calibrated to historical flood patterns, and then used to project future flood regimes using climate projections for the CCSM and GFDL earth system models, using representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5. This allows for an improved understanding of potential extreme changes in regional flooding events, to better bound the conditions for the use of decision-making. By understanding potential extremes, planning can then be undertaken to identify shortcomings in current systems, and proactive approaches can be taken to mitigate or reduce the risk to communities and infrastructure.