Hydrologic impact of climate change in the Saguenay watershed: comparison of downscaling methods and hydrologic models

Changes in global climate will have significant impact on local and regional hydrological regimes, which will in turn affect ecological, social and economical systems. However, climate-change impact studies on hydrologic regime have been relatively rare until recently, mainly because Global Circulation Models, which are widely used to simulate future climate scenarios, do not provide hourly or daily rainfall reliable enough for hydrological modeling. Nevertheless, more reliable rainfall series corresponding to future climate scenarios can be derived from GCM outputs using the so called ‘downscaling techniques’. This study applies two types of statistical (a stochastic and a regression based) downscaling techniques to generate the possible future values of local meteorological variables such as precipitation and temperature in the Chute-du-Diable sub-basin of the Saguenay watershed in northern Québec, Canada. The downscaled data is used as input to two different hydrologic models to simulate the corresponding future flow regime in the catchment. In addition to assessing the relative potential of the downscaling methods, the paper also provides comparative study results of the possible impact of climate change on river flow and total reservoir inflow in the Chute-du-Diable basin. Although the two downscaling techniques do not provide identical results, the time series generated by both methods indicates a general increasing trend in the mean daily temperature values. While the regression based downscaling technique resulted in an increasing trend in the mean and variability of daily precipitation values, such a trend is not obvious in the case of precipitation time series downscaled with the stochastic weather generator. Moreover, the hydrologic impact analysis made with the downscaled precipitation and temperature time series as input to the two hydrological models suggest an overall increasing trend in mean annual river flow and reservoir inflow as well as earlier spring peak flows in the basin.