1st Joint Scientific Congress of CMOS, CGU and CWRA

PCIC scientists were among the many attending the 1st Joint Scientific Congress of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, Canadian Geophysical Union and Canadian Water Resources Association, from May 26th to 30th 2013 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The theme of the conference was "Bridging Environmental Science, Policy and Resource Management." Four PCIC researchers presented talks at the congress.

PCIC Climatologist Faron Anslow will presented a talk titled, "Climatology of extreme precipitation events in British Columbia using a new comprehensive climate dataset." In his talk, he discussed how to catalogue the occurance of extreme precipitation across British Columbia, using a new comprehensive data set from Environment Canada, in order to create a climatological baseline. 

In his talk, "Statistical Emulation of Streamflow Projections: Application to CMIP3 and CMIP5 Climate Change Projections," PCIC Lead of Hydrological Impacts, Markus Schnorbus, explored whether the streamflow projections based on a 23-member hydrological ensemble are representative of the full range of uncertainty in streamflow projections from all of the models from the third phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. He also examined if the models from the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project present a different picture of future streamflow changes.

PCIC Regional Climate Impacts Analyst Stephen Sobie presented a talk titled, "An analysis of climate extremes in Canada using gridded downscaling of regional climate model simulations." In this talk he discussed how two different statistical downscaling methods can be used to improve the representation of topographic features, such as valley temperature and precipitation effects. He presented some climate indices that have been computed from downscaled output and one application, in which precipitation extremes are studied in the context of highway construction and maintenance.

PCIC  Hydrologist Arelia Werner willpresented a talk titled, "Uncertainty in Simulating Hydrologic Extremes using Statistically Downscaled Climate Data." In her talk, she examined how the choice of downscaling technique affects the uncertainty in projections of annual extremes in the Peace River Basin, using four reanalysis products and downscaling with six different statistical models.

More information about this event can be found on the CMOS website.