The Western Producer - Prairie precipitation predictions: right amounts at the wrong times
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Or you can watch the original presentation here (Nov 29th, 2021 webinar).
A new article in The Western Producer discusses the impact of climate change on precipitation patterns in the prairie provinces. Dave Sauchyn, research coordinator at the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative, reviews some of the likely changes and how they are going to impact Western farmers in his presentation for the Saskatchewan Agriculture Agronomy Update:
“In other words, with warmer temperatures, more evaporation from land and ocean, and that warmer air has the capacity to hold more moisture and therefore if the moisture doesn’t precipitate in rain, in the absence of rain is an increase in the severity of drought,” Sauchyn said.
He has graphed Canadian prairie precipitation over the past 30 years and projected it for the next 30. In a warmer climate the Prairies will receive more precipitation but it will likely increase in winter and spring with only a small increase in summer. The increase will not be enough to offset losses from the increase in atmospheric evaporation in a warmer climate.
“There’s an increased probability of both lower precipitation and higher precipitation. So even though the models project slightly more precipitation, there’s a higher probability of dry events,” Sauchyn said. “The cooling effect of evaporation is very much reduced in dry years, and we tend to get the highest temperatures, nearly always we get the highest temperatures, in the driest years.”
However, the Prairies are losing the advantage of cold winters, as the average winter temperature rises and the number of frost-free days increases. “Most of our soil moisture is derived from melting snow and the nice thing about snow is it accumulates, it’s natural storage of water. As winter gets warmer and shorter, we can expect more of our precipitation to arrive in the form of rain as opposed to snow, and then we can expect snow to melt within various times in winter,”
“So, this is the kind of climate that, if you’re sensitive to weather, which of course the ag industry is very much, you have to be prepared to take advantage of more winter moisture,” said Sauchyn. “You have to be prepared to take advantage of years that are drier than we’ve experienced and wetter than we’ve experienced.”