Publications Library

This article focuses on the importance of collaboration in statistics by Canadian researchers and highlights the contributions that Canadian statisticians have made to many research areas in environmetrics. We provide a discussion about different vehicles that have been developed for collaboration by Canadians in the environmetrics context as well as specific scientific areas that are focused on environmetrics research in Canada including climate science, forestry, and fisheries, which are areas of importance for natural resources in Canada.

This issue of the PCIC Update contains the following stories: An Unprecedented Warm and Dry Start to Autumn in Southern BC Gives Way to a Cooler Winter Forecast, Continued Refinement of PCIC’s Downscaling Methods, Analysing Climate Change Impacts on the Nechako River and Working With Hydrologic Projections. It also contains an update on the Pacific Climate Seminar Series, staff changes at PCIC and PCIC's most recent publications. The staff profile in this issue is on Dr. Samah Larabi.

This is the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium's 2021-2022 Corporate Report.

This report, the second volume in the VIC Generation 2 deployment reports, provides a description of modelling glacier dynamics with the HydroConductor Model.

This, the fifth volume in the VIC Generation 2 deployment reports, provides a description of model calibration.

A strong atmospheric river made landfall in southwestern British Columbia, Canada on November 14th, 2021, bringing two days of intense precipitation to the region. The resulting floods and landslides led to the loss of at least five lives, cut Vancouver off entirely from the rest of Canada by road and rail, and made this the costliest natural disaster in the province's history. Here we show that when characterised in terms of storm-averaged water vapour transport, the variable typically used to characterise the intensity of atmospheric rivers, westerly atmospheric river events of this magnitude are approximately one in ten year events in the current climate of this region, and that such events have been made at least 60% more likely by the effects of human-induced climate change. Characterised in terms of the associated two-day precipitation, the event is substantially more extreme, approximately a one in fifty to one in a hundred year event, and the probability of events at least this large has been increased by a best estimate of 45% by human-induced climate change. The effects of this precipitation on streamflow were exacerbated by already wet conditions preceding the event, and by rising temperatures during the event that led to significant snowmelt, which led to streamflow maxima exceeding estimated one in a hundred year events in several basins in the region. Based on a large ensemble of simulations with a hydrological model which integrates the effects of multiple climatic drivers, we find that the probability of such extreme streamflow events in October to December has been increased by human-induced climate change by a best estimate of 120–330%. Together these results demonstrate the substantial human influence on this compound extreme event, and help motivate efforts to increase resiliency in the face of more frequent events of this kind in the future.

This issue of the PCIC Update covers the following stories: Downscaled CMIP6 Data Now Available; Release of the Design Value Explorer; IPCC Reports on Impacts, Adaptation, Vulnerability and Mitigation; and New Section and Sector Modules on ClimateData.ca. The Science Brief mentioned in this issue is on changes to Western Canadian glaciers. The talks discussed in this issue were delivered by Professor Ted Shepherd, Dr. Mohamed Ali Ben Alaya, Dr. Nathan Gillett and Markus Schnorbus, Dr. John Fyfe, Dr. Paul Kushner and Dr. Hans von Storch. The staff profile in this issue is on Stacey O'Sullivan.

On 6–8 January 2021, a cold air outbreak swept across eastern China, peaking over the North China Plain the night of 6 January, when 219 weather stations recorded the lowest nighttime temperature since 1961. In total, 498 stations recorded the lowest daytime or nighttime temperature since 1961 during the 3-day event. This event, together with two other cold outbreaks that affected the region on 13–15 December 2020 and 29 December 2020–1 January 2021, led to historic peak electricity demand and resumption of the operation of the only remaining coalfired generating plant in Beijing. This analysis puts the cold outbreak into historical perspective by considering changes in the likelihood of such events over 1961–2020 in the context of a climate that is being warmed by anthropogenic forcing.

PCIC is a regional climate service provider dedicated to ensuring the provision of quantitative, high qualityclimate information to stakeholders and the public in BC and more widely. PCIC considers itself to be a competent, innovative and reliable climate service provider that works at a very high level of technical proficiency. Motivated by our stakeholders’ needs, PCIC bases its services on results obtained from the global climate research community and its own applied, regional climate research. It also works to increase the capacity of others to use climate information and understand its limitations.

This plan articulates PCIC’s ambition to serve as THE authoritative climate services provider in our region by setting out several service objectives for the organization that encompass a spectrum of activities ranging from direct data delivery to user-specific interpretation and training. These overarching service objectives are supported by several strategic objectives that are required to achieve our service objectives as well as a strategy for electronic services delivery. A key tool in achieving these objectives will be the careful use of climate change simulations produced for Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6; Eyring et al., 2016), which uses updated models compared to those considered in IPCC (2014), and considers a wider range of emissions scenarios, called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs).