High-Resolution Meteorological Forcing Data for Hydrological Modelling and Climate Change Impact Analysis in Mackenzie River Basin

This dataset provides an improved set of forcing data for large scale hydrological models for climate change impacts assessment in Mackenzie River Basin (MRB). The best available gridded data in the MRB is from the high resolution forecasts of the Global Environmental Multiscale (GEM) atmospheric model and outputs of the Canadian Precipitation Analysis (CaPA), but these datasets have a short historical record. The EU WATCH ERA-Interim reanalysis (WFDEI) has a longer historical record, but has often been found to be biased relative to observations over Canada. The strengths of both datasets (GEM-CaPA and WFDEI) were blended to produce a less-biased long record product (WFDEI-GEM-CaPA http://doi.org/10.20383/101.0111) for hydrological modelling and climate change impacts assessment over the MRB. This product is then used to bias-correct climate projections from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis Canadian Regional Climate Model (CanRCM4) between 1951–2100 under Representative Concentration Pathway— RCP8.5, and an analysis of the datasets shows the biases in the original WFDEI product have been removed and the climate change signals in CanRCM4 are preserved. The resulting bias-corrected data (CanRCM4-WFDEI-GEM-CaPA 3h*0.125ᵒ resolution) are a consistent set of historical and climate projection data suitable for large-scale modelling and future climate scenario analysis. **Please note: This dataset is linked to an ESSD paper at https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-629-2020.  The authors kindly request that you reference this paper in addition to the dataset.