Analysis of Precipitation and Temperature of the Lower Liard River Basin, using Wavelet Transform

English Abstract:

Since the mid-90s, discharge from streams and rivers draining the discontinuous permafrost zone of the southern Northwest Territories has increased and these rates have accelerated in recent years. Work done by Connon and others suggested two hypotheses; one is related to meteorology and other to landscape changes and feedbacks caused by the permafrost thaw. To address the meteorological hypothesis wavelet transforms of observations were used to explore the dominant oscillations of precipitation and temperature in the Lower Liard River Basin between 2004 and 2014. Wavelets provide information about the nature and time– frequency localization of oscillations. Preliminary results show considerable similarity among individual series from ten climate stations for temperature and for precipitation. As expected, there are differences in the interannual between temperature and precipitation variability; for temperature, there were significant oscillations of about 4, 8, 16 and 256 to 365 days in all stations, for precipitation the significant oscillations were at 16 to 32 days. These results suggest that the temperature signal has a large spatial domain, while the precipitation signal has a smaller spatial domain