Title

Assessment of Global and Regional Reanalyses Data for Hydro- Climatic Impact Studies in the Upper Thames River Basin

Authors

Tarana A. Solaiman, The University of Western OntarioFollow
Slobodan P. Simonovic, The University of Western OntarioFollow

Files

Summary

This study evaluates NCEP-NCAR reanalyses hydro-climatic data as an initial check for assessment of climate change studies and hydrologic modeling on the basin scale. Reanalysis data set for daily precipitation, and temperature from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction-National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP-NCAR) (a) global (NNGR) and (b) regional (NARR) reanalysis project are used as input into the semi-distributed hydrologic model (HEC-HMS) during the period of 1980-2005. First, the precipitation and temperature data are interpolated to selected stations to check for their trends and similarity in means and variances. Although NARR shows some over-estimated values, mainly in estimating temperature during the summer months, it has been able to capture the trends. NNGR, on the other hand, has produced inferior results in many cases, especially in generating precipitation when compared with the observed values. With its improved atmospheric analytical ability, NARR appears to have performed better than the NNGR, suggesting that with coarse resolution NNGR may not be applied in climate change studies for medium or small watersheds. Next, an extensive analysis is performed for assessing the performance of the reanalysis data generated flows by comparing it with the observed inputs during May-November. The stream flows generated from the NARR dataset show encouraging results for simulating summertime low flows with less variability and error. NNGR dataset, have proven to be less accurate and highly variable. This study suggests that NARR can be adequately used as either an additional source of data or as an alternative to observations in data scarce regions.

ISBN (Online)

978-0-7714-2899-9

ISBN (Print)

978-0-7714-2892-0

Publication Date

1-2011

Publisher

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Western Ontario

City

London, Ontario, Canada

Disciplines

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Notes

Report no.: 071

Recommended Citation

Solaiman, Tarana A. and Simonovic, Slobodan P., "Assessment of Global and Regional Reanalyses Data for Hydro- Climatic Impact Studies in the Upper Thames River Basin" (2011). Water Resources Research Report. 35.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/wrrr/35