jhamman / storylines

Using quantitative hydrologic storylines to assess climate impacts

Quantitative Hydrologic Storylines

Using quantitative hydrologic storylines to assess climate impacts

Fig. 1 Clark et al. (2016): Schematic on approaches to explicitly characterize and reduce the myriad uncertainties in assessments of the hydrologic impacts of climate change and the development of representative quantitative hydrologic storylines for specific applications.

Overview

storylines is a framework for characterizing uncertainty in traditional hydroloic climate impacts modeling chains (climate models, downscaling methods, hydrologic models). It includes tools for evaluating model fidelity and culling models accordingly to reduce these uncertainties, and finally distilling projections into a discrete set of quantitative hydrologic storylines that represent key, impact-focused, features from the full range of future scenarios.

storylines is being developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) - Hydrometeorological Applications Program (HAP) under the support of USACE.

Tools

• Characterization of modeling chain uncertainties
  • Earth System Model (ESM) selection
  • Internal/natural/stochastic variability in ESMs
  • Downscaling methods (e.g. statistical, dynamic)
  • Hydrologic models
  • Hydrologic parameters
• Reducing modeling chain uncertainties
  • Selection of likely scenarios
  • Informed sampling of ESMs
  • Informed sampling of ESM ensemble members
  • Use of more reliable downscaling methods
  • Improved hydrologic model structure
  • Improved parameter estimation

Documentation

The official documentation is hosted on ReadTheDocs at http://storylines.readthedocs.io.

Get in touch

• Report bugs, suggest features, or view the source code on GitHub.

History

storylines is a toolkit developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Development began in the fall of 2016. A review of the critical issues this project aims to tackle is presented in Clark et al. (2016).

References

Clark, M.P., Wilby, R.L., Gutmann, E.D., Vano, J.A., Gangopadhyay, S., Wood, A.W., Fowler, H.J., Prudhomme, C., Arnold, J.R. and Brekke, L.D., 2016. Characterizing uncertainty of the hydrologic impacts of climate change. Current Climate Change Reports, 2(2), pp.55-64, doi:10.1007/s40641-016-0034-x.

License

Copyright 2016, Nation Center for Atmospheric Research

Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3) (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

Quantitative Hydrologic Storylines -
Toolkit for understanding climate impacts uncertainty.
Copyright (C) 2016 National Center for Atmospheric Research

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

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but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
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