Identification

Title

21st Century Hydrologic Projections for Alaska and Hawaii

Alternative title(s)

d010111

Abstract

<p>High resolution ensembles of hydroclimate projections are useful for climate and water resources adaptation planning and many of these datasets exist over United States focused domains specifically the Contiguous United States (CONUS). However, very few century-long, high-resolution hydroclimate projections exist over Alaska and Hawaii and no statewide projections including hydrology exist. This motivated us to develop a dataset consisting of multiple statistically downscaled climate model projections and corresponding off-line hydrologic model simulations to obtain hydrologic simulations from 1950 to 2099 over the two domains, which fills a critical gap in hydroclimate projection capabilities for these two under-served regions. We take an approach similar to previous CONUS hydrologic assessments where we: 1) select climate model outputs based on CMIP5 Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 and 8.5; 2) perform statistical downscaling to generate high-resolution climate input data for hydrologic models (12-km grid-spacing for Alaska and 1-km for Hawaii); and 3) perform off-line hydrologic model simulations, using the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model. A notable difference in the hydrologic model configuration from CONUS to this case, is the use of full water-energy balance computation with a simple glacier model for Alaska. Overall, the simulations in Hawaii show large uncertainty in total runoff driven by large variability in precipitation among the GCMs used for this study. Robust warming and increases in precipitation produce runoff increases for most of Alaska. However, runoff is likely to decrease in current glacierized areas in southeast Alaska.</p>

Resource type

dataset

Resource locator

https://gdex.ucar.edu/datasets/d010111/

protocol: https

name: Dataset Description

description: Related Link

function: information

https://gdex.ucar.edu/datasets/d010111/dataaccess/

protocol: https

name: Data Access

description: Related Link

function: download

Unique resource identifier

code

codeSpace

Dataset language

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

climatologyMeteorologyAtmosphere

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

dataset

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

revision

effective date

2021-03-30

Keyword set

keyword value

MODELS > MODELS

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

revision

effective date

2025-10-03

Keyword set

keyword value

EARTH SCIENCE > ATMOSPHERE > ATMOSPHERIC TEMPERATURE > SURFACE TEMPERATURE > MAXIMUM/MINIMUM TEMPERATURE

EARTH SCIENCE > ATMOSPHERE > PRECIPITATION > PRECIPITATION AMOUNT

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

revision

effective date

2025-10-03

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2021-01-01

Frequency of update

notPlanned

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

organisation name

email address

datahelp@ucar.edu

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact

organisation name

NSF NCAR Geoscience Data Exchange

email address

datahelp@ucar.edu

web address

https://gdex.ucar.edu

name: NSF NCAR Geoscience Data Exchange

description: The Geoscience Data Exchange (GDEX), managed by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at NSF NCAR, contains a large collection of meteorological, atmospheric composition, and oceanographic observations, and operational and reanalysis model outputs, integrated with NSF NCAR High Performance Compute services to support atmospheric and geosciences research.

function: download

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata date

2025-10-09T01:46:16Z

Metadata language