A physically-based modelling approach to assess the impact of climate change on Canadian surface and groundwater resources

E.A. Sudicky, J. Chen, J. Gula, W.R. Peltier, Y.-J. Park, M. Ross

Dans les comptes rendus d’articles de la conférence: GeoMontréal 2013: 66th Canadian Geotechnical Conference; 11th joint with IAH-CNC

Session: Impacts of Climate Change

ABSTRACT: It is now generally accepted within the scientific community that the climate is changing, and that future climate change may have significant impact on water resources in both quantity and quality. Alterations of base flow to rivers due to changing subsurface flow patterns, fluctuations in the depth of the groundwater table and the water levels of lakes, and altered groundwater recharge/discharge patterns are examples of possible consequences of future climate change. Quantification of such impacts as driven by plausible climate-change scenarios is essential for policy makers. To date, there are numerous studies concerning this issue in the literature, but many are limited to a relatively small domain, usually up to a watershed or basin scale, and/or they fail to simulate the surface and subsurface flow regimes in a physically-based, fully-integrated manner. In this study, our physically-based model, HydroGeoSphere (HGS), is employed to simulate 2D surface water flow on the land surface together with 3D variably-saturated subsurface flow covering the entire Canadian landscape. A globally implicit scheme used to solve the nonlinear surface and subsurface flow and transport equations simultaneously. Various numerical solution and mesh resolution issues are briefly discussed in view of the large computational effort required the handle 3D continental-scale simulations, and to accommodate the highly-complex and wide-ranging terrain over the Canadian land mass. The impact of global warming on Canadian water resources is explored after calibration against historical meteorological, hydrological and hydrogeological data. In this study, we employ future down-scaled climate predictions from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and the Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM) to drive the 3D HGS computations.

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