Data for a Pilot Study Characterizing Future Climate and Hydrology in Massachusetts

The U.S. Geological Survey has developed tools for projecting twenty-first century climate and hydrologic risk in Massachusetts in collaboration with Cornell University and Tufts University. These tools included a Stochastic Weather Generator (SWG). Output from the SWG is in this data release. The release includes daily precipitation and minimum and maximum air temperature for a 64-year period in the Nashua River watershed (that includes the Squannacook River) in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. There are 100 ensembles from the SWG for warming scenarios of 0 to 8 degrees Celsius in 0.5-degree increments. The SWG data were converted to a format utilized by the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS; https://www.usgs.gov/software/precipitation-runoff-modeling-system-prms) and input to a PRMS model for the Squannacook River watershed. The PRMS input and output files for the 100 ensembles of each of the 17 warming scenarios are also included in this data release. The 1,700 PRMS output files were utilized by a Stochastic Watershed Modeling tool to correct modeling biases that are inherent with a deterministic model such as PRMS. This data release includes the output from this Stochastic Watershed Model (SWM). For each of the 100 ensembles, the SWM was used to generate 10,000 ensembles, resulting in 1 million ensembles of 64-year periods for each of the warming scenarios. For each ensemble, streamflow characteristics of the annual maximum daily discharge at the 2-, 5-, 10-, 25-, 50-, 100-, and 500-year recurrence interval and of the annual 7-day low flow at the 2- and 10-year recurrence interval were determined.