Impact of climate warming to the droughts of Canadian Prairies
Title | Impact of climate warming to the droughts of Canadian Prairies |
Publication Type | Conference Proceedings |
Year of Conference | 1997 |
Authors | Gan, T. Y., Singh P. R., and Seneka M. |
Conference Name | 65th Annual Western Snow Conference |
Series Title | Proceedings of the 65th Annual Western Snow Conference |
Date Published | May 1997 |
Publisher | Western Snow Conference |
Conference Location | Banff, Alberta |
Keywords | Climate change, Drought, Kendall's test |
Abstract | Results from applying Kendall's test to 37 stations of temperature and precipitation data, 50 stations of natural streamflow data and 13 stations of evapotranspiration data show that the Prairies have become warmer and somewhat drier in the last four to five decades. The earlier onset of spring snowmelt runoff detected by Bum (1994) further supports this finding. Results on Kendall's test on precipitation, natural streamflowand areal ET indicate that the Prairie may have become drier but the trends detected are less extensive when compared to wanning trends. The correlation-distances reveal that temperature data are generally more correlated to each other than precipitation data. The bivariate precipitation versus maximum temperature test failed to detect any link between precipitation and temperature and Kendall's test on the drought duration, severity and magnitude prepared by Bauer and Welsh (1988) for two sites in Saskatchewan also shows no significant trend in the Prairie drought. |
URL | sites/westernsnowconference.org/PDFs/1997Gan.pdf |