Open Collections

Chui, Timothy

University of British Columbia

The province of British Columbia (BC) is experiencing changes to its climate and terrain that may impact its weather, and therefore the lives of its residents and health of its ecosystems. I used the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to simulate climate-influenced changes to the weather of BC in 2021 by: (1) exploring and verifying different model configurations for dynamical downscaling, and (2) using the pseudoglobal warming (PGW) approach to perturb the input boundary conditions under different climate regimes. I explored perturbations for two warmer (future) climate regimes, and a cooler (pre-industrial) regime. Results include changes to the monthly means of temperature and precipitation in BC, as well as to the extreme June 2021 heat-wave and November 2021 atmospheric-river events. From a terrain-modification standpoint, the Elk Valley region in southeastern BC is an area of active open pit coal mining, resulting in the demolition of mountains and infilling of quarries. This led to changes in local circulations that impacted nearby ecosystems. To simulate these changes, I ran WRF at a sub-kilometre grid spacing over the Elk Valley, with current and modified terrain to simulate and quantify changes to the weather. It was found that terrain changes can have impacts on the weather much further afield than in the immediate vicinity of the mines. From all of these simulations, I was able to demonstrate the utility of high-resolution modelling to study the dynamical effects of modified climate and terrain on weather. I was also able to quantify these effects using standard weather verification metrics as well as more holistic image-comparison metrics such as the mean structural similarity index metric (MSSIM) and the radially averaged power spectral density (RAPSD). The model output of high-resolution gridded datasets tailored for BC are developed to aid future decision-making and environmental assessments.

Text

2024-12-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89977

Atmospheric Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/