The impact of climate change on individual and compound extreme events across Eastern Canada – Application to Intensity-Duration-Frequency curves in Labrador City

The possible failure of surface water management systems is one of the main concerns in the design, construction and management of critical infrastructures such as dams, nuclear facilities and mining activities, especially in northern latitudes. Extreme rainfall and sudden snowmelt events exert major controls on surface runoff and flooding events in cold regions such as Canada. Climate variability and change can alter the severity, magnitude and concurrence of such extreme events. Although the temporal variations of individual extreme events such as temperature and rainfall have been the subject of many recent studies, their joint representation as well as the spatiotemporal variations in these multivariate components are neither well-documented nor fully understood. This research aims at understanding the nonstationarity of individual and compound hazards in Eastern Canada and more specifically in Labrador City, the mining site of Rio Tinto – Iron Ore Company of Canada (IOC), through a high-dimensional statistical framework. Downscaled future climatic data records will be used as input to a statistical projection method for modeling future snow water equivalents across the studied domain. Using predicted temperatures, rainfall and snow water equivalents, univariate and multivariate future trends of the studied extremes will be quantified.

Faculty Supervisor:

Jan Franklin Adamowski

Student:

Partner:

Iron Ore Company of Canada (QC)

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Mining

University:

McGill University

Program: