Seattle Climate Change Impacts

Project Information (restricted access)

Overview

Seattle Public Utilities is sponsoring research in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Washington to explore the potential impacts that climate change may have on their ability to provide water to the metropolitan region. A technical focus of this research is to develop techniques for the downscaling of GCM-produced global climate change scenarios to localized river basins.

Another primary theme of this research is to explore and quantify the level of certainty associated with each of the steps required in the process of translating GCM outputs to localized watershed hydrology.

To perform this analysis, emission scenarios will be selected from the recent Special Report of Emission Scenarios to represent future greenhouse gas concentrations. Outputs from three to five GCC models using these scenarios will be used in conjunction with a watershed model to estimate streamflow hydrology in the future. These flows, in turn, will be used to evaluate climate change impacts on the water supply system. The impacts of climate change on water demand will also be explored.

Master's Thesis: Wiley, M.W. (2004). "Analysis Techniques to Incorporate Climate Change Information into Seattle’s Long Range Water Supply Planning," University of Washington.

Updated 05/13/2005