Leveraging expert knowledge of weather extremes, climate models, and future change to inform infrastructure design standards in Canada

Climate change has the potential to affect buildings and infrastructure by changing the conditions to which they are exposed. To better quantify and ultimately prepare for these changes, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) recently supported a collaboration between the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC) and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to develop updated guidance to the engineering community. During the project, PCIC was able to leverage knowledge gained from our extensive experience with observational datasets, the innovative use of climate simulations and expertise in the area of climate extremes to produce updated climatic design values for both historical and future periods. Dr. Curry will discuss some highlights from this project.

Bio:
Dr. Charles Curry is the Acting Lead, Regional Climate Impacts Theme at PCIC. He has a background in Earth system and regional climate modelling. His research interests include the effects of climate change on the hydrological cycle in Western North America, the added value of dynamical downscaling, observed and modelled climate extremes, the behaviour and downscaling of surface winds, simulations of global climate engineering, and the biogeochemical and radiative modelling of greenhouse gases.