CCRN Scenarios of Change Workshop
National Hydrology Research Centre, Saskatoon, SK, March 20-21, 2017
CCRN held a two-day workshop focusing on future environmental change in western Canada and how to represent certain changes in our models for large scale application. The purpose was: 1) to define plausible alternative futures which we would then run with the models and look at outcomes and feedbacks, and 2) to work with the modelling team to work out physically what we can incorporate, how many runs to include, what time frame to focus on, etc. The workshop brought together a group of nearly 40 researchers, students, and post-docs from within the network, with many informative presentations and insightful discussions over the two days. The first day involved a series of talks on particular areas of science or regional focus, which set the context for focused discussions the next day aimed at identifying objectives and target audiences, exploring potential climate scenarios and products to use as driving data, and sharing insights on process interactions and scenarios of change across the biomes to define a set of plausible futures, or narratives, to include within the future modelling. By the end of the workshop we had defined several sources of driving data, including WRF pseudo-global warming outputs and a suite of dynamically downscaled CanRCM4 outputs, we decided on future snapshots in time of 2040 and 2080 to focus our analyses on, and we made important progress on defining a set of narratives to prescribe feasible future landscapes and explore future responses and interactions over the different biomes. The outcomes are described in detail in the summary report and a synthesis of the discussions throughout the workshop is given. At the end of the report, actions and timelines are provided, and a table lists the MESH runs we aim to carry out.