Climate-Related Precipitation Extremes

The Problem: Climate extremes have many effects on agriculture, electrical utilities, infrastructure engineering, health and insurance.

The Plan: This project will provide new insights into the future occurrence of precipitation-related extremes including drought, intense precipitation events and hazardous winter precipitation. Such extremes impact many sectors across Canada including agriculture (such as through effects on food production and crop damage), electrical utilities (such as through hydro power generation and transmission impacts), engineering design (such as through improved estimation of return levels for extreme precipitation), health (such as through impacts on water quality and water-borne diseases), and insurance (with a backdrop of recent record-breaking payouts such as the Calgary flooding and Fort McMurray wildfire).

The Outcome: Significant contributions to the overarching goal of providing new information on drought and precipitation extremes in a changing climate and environment for risk management and disaster warning. The project will seek to achieve this by working with users to diagnose and predict changes in extremes and to develop new tools and approaches to help users apply this information. This project will tackle some of the most important water-related issues and contribute to improving the capability to model the climate at unprecedented resolutions.