Snowfall water equivalent projections derived uisng the statistically downscaled climate scenarios from CMIP6 global climate models (CanDCS-M6)

To help address the growing demand for snow information in a changing climate, the Canadian Centre for Climate Services (CCCS) has produced projections of daily water equivalent of snowfall and rainfall. This product is derived from the Multivariate Canadian Downscaled Climate Scenarios for CMIP6 (CanDCS-M6) dataset, produced by the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC). These datasets are available for a multi-model ensemble of 26 CMIP6 GCMs under 4 Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs): SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0, and SSP5-8.5). Additional details on the CanDCS-M6 ensemble and its downscaling methodologies are documented in Sobie et al. (2024). Snowfall water equivalent (formally known as the Height of New snowfall Water equivalent, HNW, but is more commonly abbreviated as SWE) is estimated using a solid/liquid precipitation fraction partitioning scheme described in Dai (2008) and Sobie & Murdock (2022). The solid precipitation fraction is first estimated by applying a hyperbolic tangent function to daily mean temperature outputs and then scaled between -10°C and 10°C. The fraction is then applied to total precipitation outputs to obtain snowfall water equivalent values.…

Publisher

Environment and Climate Change Canada

Resources

1

Catalogue metadata updated

2025-07-18