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Method for Evaluating Impacts of Climate Change on Snowmelt and Rain-on-Snow Events

Tailings and Mine Waste Conference (2023 : Vancouver, B.C.); University of British Columbia. Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining Engineering

Mine water management systems in northern and high-elevation areas should be designed considering the risk posed by snowmelt-induced floods (snowmelt-only and rain-on-snow) in addition to rain-only events. The effects of climate change on these events, over both operational and post-closure timescales, are important to assess. Snowmelt events often govern hydrotechnical designs in Canada; however, estimating snowmelt in a changing climate is complex and lacks guidance. Underestimates of design floods present a considerable risk for mines, with overestimates resulting in substantial costs. This paper describes a quantitative method for evaluating the impacts of climate change on snowmelt events that was applied to a closed mine site in central British Columbia (BC), Canada. A continuous-simulation snowmelt model is proposed to capture the joint probabilities of multiple climate parameters on snowmelt events. This paper includes discussion on the general requirements of a snowmelt model, available models, and sources of historical measured data and global climate model (GCM) projections for Canada. Procedures are included for calibrating and evaluating the accuracy of the snowmelt model, incorporating GCM projections into the model, and for identifying trends and accounting for non-stationary datasets. Lastly, suggestions for interpreting and presenting the results is included. The method was applied to a closed, high-elevation mine site in central BC. The continuoussimulation snowmelt model was originally developed by Klohn Crippen Berger Ltd (KCB) in GoldSim® and calibrated by the authors using available temperature, precipitation, snow course, snow pillow, and streamflow data. Future climate scenarios were run using downscaled CMIP6 GCM data.

Text

2023-12-08

Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86834

Unreviewed

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