Physical and Environmental Geography Commons^™

Paleohydrological Context For Recent Floods And Droughts In The Fraser River Basin, British Columbia, Canada, Becky L. Brice, Bethany L. Coulthard, Inga K. Homfeld, Laura A. Dye, Kevin J. Anchukaitis

Geoscience Faculty Publications

The recent intensification of floods and droughts in the Fraser River Basin (FRB) of British Columbia has had profound cultural, ecological, and economic impacts that are expected to be exacerbated further by anthropogenic climate change. In part due to short instrumental runoff records, the long-Term stationarity of hydroclimatic extremes in this major North American watershed remains poorly understood, highlighting the need to use high-resolution paleoenvironmental proxies to inform on past streamflow. Here we use a network of tree-ring proxy records to develop 11 subbasin-scale, complementary flood-and drought-season reconstructions, the first of their kind. The reconstructions explicitly target management-relevant flood and …