Abstract
Global glacier retreat driven by climate change will have major impacts on regional water availability, as many communities rely on glacier runoff for water supply during warm and dry seasons. A community whose water resources are potentially vulnerable is one that sources water from a glacier-fed river where that river is expected to substantially change if glacier contributions become negligible. However, regional assessments identifying which communities’ water resources are most vulnerable to such changes are lacking. Here we use observed streamflow measurements, gridded climate data and a database of municipal water sources for communities in Alberta, Canada, to identify the relative importance of glacier runoff at the local scale. In a scenario of negligible glacier runoff, we predict unprecedented streamflow lows at several communities. This approach provides a methodology to identify communities whose water resources may be vulnerable to glacier retreat and would benefit from more-focused research.
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Data availability
All data are publicly available. ERA-Interim reanalysis is available from ECMWF24. Glacier inventory is available from the RGI27. Topography is available from the SRTM34. Streamflow is available from the Environment Canada HYDAT database42. Municipal water source data, collected in this study, are available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3266447)43.
Code availability
Code to reproduce the main results in this study is available on GitHub (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3742162)44.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Environment Canada for providing streamflow data, the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for the ERA-Interim reanalysis data, the Randolph Glacier Inventory consortium for glacier inventory data and the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission for providing topographic data. We also thank M. Jellinek for providing feedback on the manuscript. Funding supporting this study was provided through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada.
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S.A. gathered and processed the data. S.A. developed the analysis and made the figures, both with input from V.R. S.A. and V.R. shared the writing of the paper.
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Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Shawn Marshall and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Anderson, S., Radić, V. Identification of local water resource vulnerability to rapid deglaciation in Alberta. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 933–938 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0863-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0863-4
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