Skip to main navigation Skip to search Skip to main content

A century long ensemble streamflow dataset in the Pacific Northwest to support water security assessments

  • University of Washington
  • United States Army
  • U.S. Department of the Interior

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

In the Pacific Northwest, ensemble projected streamflow datasets are valuable for assessing vulnerabilities and the resilience of reservoir systems across the region. These datasets are typically generated using a climate-hydrologic modeling chain that begins with coarse-resolution outputs from selected Earth System Model (ESMs) and socioeconomic scenarios, which are spatially downscaled, followed by hydrologic simulations driven by the downscaled meteorological forcing. In this work, a calibrated catchment-based hydrology and river model is forced by ESM outputs for several socioeconomic scenarios from the archives of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phases 5 and 6, which are downscaled using a computationally efficient weather model. The dataset comprises twenty-nine daily hydrologic traces from 1950 to 2099 for 18,000 river reaches. The dataset also includes a retrospective hydrologic simulation forced by an observation-based meteorological dataset used for hydrologic model calibration. Naturalized flows for 221sites are used to assess historical simulation fidelity. This dataset supports a variety of applications including reservoir modeling, ecological impact assessments, and hydrologic analyses under historical to projected climate conditions.

Original languageEnglish
Article number737
Number of pages19
JournalScientific data
Volume13
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 27 2026

Funding

This work was primarily funded by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Grants (W26HM432051759, W26HM432051757, W26HM411547729 and HQUSACE17IIS/003) and was performed at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which is a research and development center of the U.S. National Science Foundation (under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977). It leveraged modeling and development work underway with sponsorship from the US Bureau of Reclamation Science and Technology Program, and high-performance computing support from the Derecho system (doi:10.5065/qx9a-pg09) provided by the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), sponsored by the National Science Foundation and CISL for providing computing support. We gratefully acknowledge William Ryan Currier, Bert Kruyt, and Abigail Smith for producing the ICAR-downscaled ESM temperature and precipitation dataset.

FundersFunder number
United States Department of Defense | United States Army | U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (US Army Corps of Engineers)W26HM432051759, W26HM432051757, W26HM411547729, HQUSACE17IIS/003, IPA000-20-0-0008

    Keywords

    • Climate-change
    • Data set
    • Model
    • Impacts
    • Precipitation
    • Temperature
    • Snowpack
    • Uncertainty
    • Performance
    • Attributes

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'A century long ensemble streamflow dataset in the Pacific Northwest to support water security assessments'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this