Assessing water and energy budgets for the Saskatchewan River Basin

The Saskatchewan River Basin (SRB) in Canada is one of the most important agricultural regions for the country. Despite the critical dependency of the region's agricultural and societal activities to climate variability and change, no comprehensive water and energy budget assessment has yet been developed for this drought-prone region. This study represents the first attempt at developing a comprehensive climatology of water and energy budgets for the SRB. Different observed, remotely-sensed, (re-)analyzed and modeled datasets were used to obtain independent estimates of the budgets. In particular, flux measurements from the Boreal Ecosystem Research and Monitoring Sites (BERMS) Coordinated Enhanced Observing Period (CEOP) reference site provide valuable validation data for the surface flux assessments. Budget results for the SRB are compared to those assessed for the Mackenzie River Basin to gain insights into the differences in water and energy cycling, and challenges in their quantifications, for these two neighboring major basins in North America. Apart from the development of state-of-the-art budget estimates for the SRB, the relative merits of current models, data assimilation systems and global blended datasets in representing aspects of the water and energy cycle of this semi-arid region were also assessed. Although some of the assessed component budgets compared quite well with observations, magnitudes of the residuals in balancing the budgets are often comparable to the budget terms themselves in all the analysis datasets, suggesting that substantial improvements to the models and observations are needed before we can vastly improve the assessment of water and energy budgets for the region.