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Hydroclimatic changes in Alaska portrayed by a high-resolution regional climate simulation

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Abstract

The Arctic has been warming faster than the global average during recent decades, and trends are projected to continue through the twenty-first century. Analysis of climate change impacts across the Arctic using dynamical models has almost exclusively been limited to outputs from global climate models or coarser regional climate models. Coarse resolution simulations limit the representation of physical processes, particularly in areas of complex topography and high land-surface heterogeneity. Here, current climate reference and future regional climate model simulations based on the RCP8.5 scenario over Alaska at 4 km grid spacing are compared to identify changes in snowfall and snowpack. In general, results show increases in total precipitation, large decreases in snowfall fractional contribution over 30% in some areas, decreases in snowpack season length by 50–100 days in lower elevations and along the southern Alaskan coastline, and decreases in snow water equivalent. However, increases in snowfall and snowpack of sometimes greater than 20% are evident for some colder northern areas and at the highest elevations in southern Alaska. The most significant changes in snow cover and snowfall fractional contributions occur during the spring and fall seasons. Finally, the spatial pattern of winter temperatures above freezing has small-scale spatial features tied to the topography. Such areas would not be resolved with coarser resolution regional or global climate model simulations.

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Data availability

The reference and future simulations are freely available at https://doi.org/10.5065/D61Z42T0. These include hourly 2-D surface output and six hourly 3-D atmosphere output.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge Flavio Lehner and Joe Hamman for their helpful discussions regarding the sea ice methodology. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive reviews which greatly improved the manuscript.

Funding

This study was funded by the US Army Corps of Engineers Climate Preparedness and Resilience program and supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is a major facility sponsored by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977, specifically the NCAR Water System program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

    Andrew J. Newman, Martyn P. Clark, Kyoko Ikeda, Lulin Xue & Ethan D. Gutmann

  2. Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Andrew J. Monaghan

  3. Centre for Hydrology, University of Saskatchewan, Canmore, Alberta, T1W 3G1, Canada

    Martyn P. Clark

  4. U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, Climate Preparedness and Resilience Programs, Seattle, WA, USA

    Jeffrey R. Arnold

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  1. Andrew J. Newman
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Contributions

MPC, JRA, and AJN were responsible for the initial project proposal. AJM, KI, AJN, EDG, and LX were responsible for the model configuration and data preparation. AJM and AJN performed the reference and PGW WRF simulations, respectively. AJN performed the initial analysis and drafted the manuscript. All authors contributed to iterative analysis and editing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Andrew J. Newman.

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The WRF model is freely available at https://github.com/wrf-model/WRF

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Newman, A.J., Monaghan, A.J., Clark, M.P. et al. Hydroclimatic changes in Alaska portrayed by a high-resolution regional climate simulation. Climatic Change 164, 17 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-02956-x

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