Impact of climate warming to the droughts of Canadian Prairies

TitleImpact of climate warming to the droughts of Canadian Prairies
Publication TypeConference Proceedings
Year of Conference1997
AuthorsGan, T. Y., Singh P. R., and Seneka M.
Conference Name65th Annual Western Snow Conference
Series TitleProceedings of the 65th Annual Western Snow Conference
Date PublishedMay 1997
PublisherWestern Snow Conference
Conference LocationBanff, Alberta
KeywordsClimate 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.

URLsites/westernsnowconference.org/PDFs/1997Gan.pdf