A key challenge for water resource planning is the quantification of the potential impacts of a drying climate on aquatic ecosystems. Global climate models are now routinely downscaled and applied to hydrological simulations to allow the production of an ensemble of potential flow scenarios. These scenarios can then be analysed to compare the performance of flow-dependent species and ecological processes under alternate climates. This analysis can be conducted using the Eco Risk Projector application, which is used by the Queensland Government to model ecological risks to 30+ species and ecological processes under different water resource development scenarios.
We implemented functionality in Eco Risk Projector to automatically ingest 44 alternative hydrological scenarios generated from downscaled climate models which were subsequently applied to 130-year daily time step water planning hydrological models. Those scenarios are batch run across ecological species and process models and the results summarised and visualised to allow the interpretation of potential climate change impacts. The models are run at a site level, and the results aggregated across locations for a given species and scenario to explore the spatial risk of multiple failures across the landscape for a given scenario.
We have learned that it is difficult to run analysis for the very large volume of data that is required for climate change scenarios. We have also learned that once the analysis is run, it is difficult to summarise and visualise the results in a way that is easy to interpret. Finally, we have seen the value of quantifying the broader spatial/system impact of climate change scenarios over and above considering single locations. Having addressed these difficulties, we have produced an approach and computational capacity can be universally applied to any water planning area where daily flow data is generated to represent potential future climates.