Opening the doors to discovery
Advancing climate modelling
Aquanty climate scientist Andre Erler is eager for the results from Canada1Water’s simulations — and just as excited to see what other researchers do with them once they’re publicly available.
DOWNSCALING A REGIONAL CLIMATE MODEL - The C1W team based its regional climate model on the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model — with plenty of bias correction for maximum accuracy. Image source: Canadian Space Agency, based on a graphic developed for an article in the journal, Sensors.
With the R&D phase of C1W set to wrap up in spring 2024, Andre Erler is thinking about the many ‘why’ questions he hopes there will be time to answer after the simulations have run.
“I hope we’ll get to look at snow before the end,” Erler says. “And lakes, too — changes with ice cover and how they affect lake-effect precipitation. We know lake surface temperatures have increased more than air temperatures. We think that’s probably because of the way water layers respond to air temperature at the surface. There are so many interesting questions: why is this happening, what’s driving the changes?”
While he and his colleagues will continue to work with the C1W outputs, Erler knows many answers will come from other researchers who take up the C1W data.
“A lot of climate researchers focus on data analysis,” Erler says. “With Canada1Water, they could generate all kinds of unexpected insights. You never really know what’s in a simulation once you build it — why things happen and what the implications may be. I fully expect data teams to find things we have no idea are even there.”
“We’re basically providing a forcing dataset that can be used for hydrological modelling or impact modelling, saving other researchers from going through the labour-intensive process of building their own. I can’t wait to see what people do with it.”
Giving researchers a more accurate starting point
In building the C1W climate model, Erler and his teammates knew they wanted to take a dynamical (i.e., regional climate modelling) approach when downscaling from global climate models to ‘zoom in’ on Canada.
“You have two choices,” Erler explains. “You can use regional climate modelling or go with statistical downscaling, which is more common because it’s faster and easier. But the statistical approach is limited to just temperature and precipitation, and not every process you’re modelling is going to depend on those factors.”
He gives the example of evapotranspiration, which is caused by a combination of temperature and solar radiation.
“Climate change doesn’t do anything to radiation, but if you parameterize your model using temperature alone, you imply that it does,” Erler says. “This isn’t a problem for us because we’re using a regional climate model that has radiation in it. Same with humidity. Only with regional climate modelling do you get a full physical description of the surface and atmosphere.”
That means researchers working with the C1W model will have a better chance of generating accurate insights into the impacts of climate change.
Skipping square one
Part of the reason many researchers choose data analysis over modelling is that building and running climate models is expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Andre Erler is a Senior Climate Scientist at Aquanty and climate lead on the Canada1Water project, coordinating all activities related to climate, snow and permafrost.
“You can run a hydrologic model pretty quickly on a local workstation or a big computing node,” Erler says. “A single basin might take a few days on one node in HydroGeoSphere™. For a climate model like WRF, you could be looking at 10 nodes and months of runtime. It’s a whole other magnitude.”
Canada1Water will give scientists the opportunity to jumpstart their own modelling initiatives.
“We’re basically providing a forcing dataset that can be used for hydrological modelling or impact modelling, saving other researchers from going through the labour-intensive process of building their own,” Erler says. “I can’t wait to see what people do with it.”