Salinas and Carmel Rivers Basin Study (SCRBS): Future Climate

This digital dataset contains the baseline and future climate data used as the basis for analysis of current and future water supplies and demands in the Salinas and Carmel Rivers Basin Study (SCRBS). SCRBS uses a suite of integrated hydrologic models to explore impacts of future climate and socioeconomic scenarios on water supplies and demands in the basins. SCRBS considers one baseline climate scenario that represents recent historical climate conditions and five future climate scenarios that encompass the range of uncertainty in projections of future climate conditions through the end of the 21st century. The baseline scenario was developed by removing trends from an observed historical climate dataset such that the long-term monthly mean and variance over the full period of record (1931-2015) are consistent with observed historical averages over the baseline period (1980-2009). Future climate scenarios were developed by adjusting the baseline scenario to reflect projected changes in the distributions of monthly precipitation and temperature. The five future climate scenarios reflect the range of projected changes across an ensemble of statistically downscaled climate projections: Hot-Wet (HW), Warm-Wet (WW), Hot-Dry (HD), Warm-Dry (WD), and Central Tendency (CT). Analysis of future climate conditions was based on the Localized Constructed Analogues (LOCA) dataset, which includes statistically downscaled climate projections from global climate models (Pierce and others, 2014). Baseline and future climate scenarios were spatially downscaled from a native 1/16° grid to a 270-meter grid. The data set includes daily 270-meter gridded spatially distributed daily precipitation (PPT), maximum and minimum air temperature (TMX and TMN, respectively), and potential evapotranspiration (PET) from 1/1/2016 to 12/31/2100.

Pierce, D. W., Cayan, D. R., and Thrasher, B. L., 2014, Statistical downscaling using Localized Constructed Analogs (LOCA): Journal of Hydrometeorology, v. 15, no. 6, p. 2558-2585, https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-14-0082.1.