Water Stewardship Information Sources
| Citation | Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC). Climate BC and Climate WNA. |
|---|---|
| Organization | PCIC |
| URL | http://cfcg.forestry.ubc.ca/projects/climate-data/climatebcwna/ |
| Abstract/Description or Keywords | A program to generate high-resolution climate data for climate change studies and applications in British Columbia and western North America ClimateBC and Climate WNA utilize historical weather station data and global circulation model regional predictions to project future seasonal and annual climate variables in BC and western North America. The programs extract and downscale PRISM (Daly et al. 2002) monthly data (2.5 x 2.5 arcmin) for the reference period (1961-1990), and calculate seasonal and annual climate variables for specific locations based on latitude, longitude and elevation (optional). The programs also downscale and integrates historical (1901-2011) (ver 3.1, Mitchell and Jones 2005 for 1901-2009) and future climate data sets (2020s, 2050s and 2080s) generated by various global circulation models. The output includes both directly calculated and derived climate variables. There are 21 annual, 48 seasonal and 144 monthly climate variables. Methodologies are described in Wang et al. (2006, 2012). The programs use a combination of bilinear interpolation and elevation adjustment to downscale the baseline climate data (1961-1990 normals) into scale-free point data. Partial derivative elevation adjustment functions, developed individually for each monthly temperature variable, are applied to bilinearly interpolated baseline data. For precipitation variables, only bilinear interpolation is applied for the downscaling. For historical and future climate data, the downscaling is achieved through a delta approach by adding anomalies of historical years or future periods to the scale-free baseline data generated at run-time by the program. With this approach, the errors associated with the baseline data in the historical and future climate data are substantially reduced (Wang et al. 2012). The effect of the downscaling is illustrated below. Both programs are freely available in a stand-alone desktop version or Google Map based web-version. The desktop versions are more robust, allowing users to generate and view data for more than one location at a time, which can be done using input coordinate files for a period or a time series. The web-based versions are designed for periodic users or those with program installation restrictions on their computers. The web-based version of Climate BC also serves as an interactive platform to visualize (and download) spatial climate data over top of ecosystem classification and forest tree species bioclimate envelopes for British Columbia. |
| Information Type | mapping |
| Regional Watershed | Province |
| Sub-watershed if known | |
| Aquifer # | |
| Comments | periodic updates |
| Project status | ongoing |
| Contact Name | PCIC |
| Contact Email | http://www.pacificclimate.org/contact-us |