Water Allocation Challenges of South Saskatchewan River Basin under the Combined Impacts of Climate Change and El Niño Southern Oscillation

Abstract

The outlook and future water resources management of the South Saskatchewan River Basin (SSRB) in Alberta, Canada, under the potential combined impact of climate change and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), has been assessed using the water resources management model (WRMM) of Alberta Environment and Parks. The potential combined impact of climate change on the SSRB water management is simulated by WRMM on the basis of the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) climate scenarios of the 2040–2069 (2050s) projected by general circulation models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), together with an active El Niño or La Niña. From results obtained for this study, license holders of the SSRB categorized under district irrigation, junior and future private irrigation, and senior, junior, and future nonirrigation consumptive user groups could be either more or less affected, depending on whether the active climate anomaly will be El Niño or La Niña, than by the impact of climate change alone.