Overview

These pages show estimates of climate impacts on the northeastern part of the US. Historic and climate model data from the latest IPCC simulations of the 20th and 21st centuries are used to force the VIC land surface model to produce fields of hydrologic fluxes and states at 1/2 and 1/8 degree resolution. Click on one of the links to the left to see alternative views of the results and comparisons between simulations. The VIC future climate simulations were carried out by Tara Troy. The streamflow routing and plots were done by Lifeng Luo.

Data Downloads

Daily basin streamflow data from observations and simulations are available to download as a tar/gzip file. This contains data for observations, 2 historic simulations and 4 climate scenario simulations: results.tar.gz (227Mb).

Simulation Details

The results on these pages are taken either from observations (streamflow) or simulations using the VIC (Variable Capacity Infiltration) land surface model. Streamflow observations are from the USGS website. The VIC model simulates the full water and energy balance at the earth's surface by modeling such processes as canopy interception, evapotranspiration, runoff generation, infiltration, soil water drainage and snow pack accumulation and melt. The model is applied on a spatial grid with forcings (precipitation, temperature, radiation, ...), soil properties (porosity, hydraulic conductivity, ...) and vegetation parameters (LAI, stomatal and architectural resistances, ...) specified at each grid cell. Sub-grid tiles are used to account for sub-grid heteorogeneity in land cover type, storm coverage, variable infiltration and elevation.

The simulations carried out with the VIC model are as follows: two observation forced simulations of the 20th century have been carried out by the Surface Water Research Group at the Univ. of Washington for 1950-2000 at 1/8th degree spatial resolution (UW50) and 1915-2003 at 1/2 degree resolution (UW_EXT), both at a daily timestep. These simulations are forced with precipitation and temperature from gauge observations. A number of future climate simulations have also been carried out at Princeton on the 1/8th degree grid using monthly precipitation and temperature from the PCM and HadCM3 GCMs. These monthly data are downscaled to 1/8th degree and daily timestep using resampling from the observed forcing datasets and then used to force the VIC model. Forcing data are available for two future climate scenarios (SRESA1 and SRESB1) resulting in four VIC simulations (2 GCMs X 2 scenarios). These simulations run from 1960-2100. Gridded fields of runoff (surface and baseflow) from these simulations are routed through stream networks using a lumped routing model (for small basins) that can then be compared with observed streamflow measurements.

Below is a map of elevation for the northeast US at 1/8th degree resolution

Map of elevation (m)