Modeling Mackenzie Basin Surface Water Balance during CAGES with the Canadian Regional Climate Model

Simulation of Water Sources and Precipitation Recycling for the MacKenzie, Mississippi, and Amazon River Basins

“…Another issue not included in these tables is the impact of snow on the land-atmosphere interactions in MAGS. Snow is still present in this simulation, and is also observed, during May and June (Betts et al 2003;MacKay et al 2003). While snow does not show a clear relationship with precipitation recycling, snow does act to decrease the basin evaporation (correlation = -0.71, not shown in these tables).…”

Northern Lake Impacts on Local Seasonal Climate

“…1a. A 15-min time step is employed following MacKay et al (2003). Clearly, the surface flux estimates from a 51-km resolution grid are too coarse to constitute representative forcing fields to drive the lake model, which has a 5-min (approximately 10 km) horizontal resolution.…”

Evaluation of geo‐referenced grids of 1961–1990 Canadian temperature and precipitation normals

“…For example, the dominant parameters on British Columbia's coast in winter included local slope and elevation, while in summer, the dominant parameters included a shield effect NE and a regional slope E-W. Stations that consistently reported outliers were examined in detail and some were removed from the regression analysis. Grids of temperature and precipitation normals created using this method were combined with grids of anomalies from the Optimal Interpolation technique and used in the verification of the Canadian Regional Climate Model over the Mackenzie Basin (MacKay et al, 2003); and in studies of changes to the distribution of monthly and annual runoff in the Mackenzie Basin under climate change (Soulis et al, 1994). In addition to an understanding of multivariate regression, this method requires a knowledge of dominant physiographic features across the country.…”

“…The grids provide better spatial coverage and can be easily combined or integrated with other geo-referenced environmental variables. For example, long-term series of climatological grids are used in studies of regional climate change and variability across Canada (Zhang et al, 2000); to build hydrological models that calculate water budgets (Hogg et al, 1996;Louie et al, 2002); to map plant-climate response in the context of forest planning and management (McKenney et al, 1996); to map plant hardiness zones for agriculture (McKenney et al, 2001); to assess aridity and the paleoclimatic context of recent droughts on the Canadian Plains (Sauchyn et al, 2002(Sauchyn et al, , 2003b; to verify the quality of dendroclimatology reconstruction (Watson, 2004), to evaluate the Canadian Regional Climate Model over the Mackenzie basin (MacKay et al, 2003).…”