Basin Characterization Model (BCMv8) for California Coastal Basins - Monthly Historical (water years 1896-2019) and Future (water years 2006-2099) Climate and Hydrology

This data release contains monthly 270-meter gridded Basin Characterization Model (BCMv8) climate inputs and hydrologic outputs for 17 California Coastal Basins (Eel River, Fort Bragg, Fort Ross, Klamath, Los Angeles, Mad River, Mattole, Napa Sonoma, Russian River, Salinas, San Diego, San Francisco Coastal South, Santa Clara River Valley, Santa Clara River Valley South Bay, Smith, South Bay, and South Delta) and the surrounding contributing watershed area containing 181 groundwater basins. Downscaled gridded climate inputs (Daly et al., 2008) include: precipitation (ppt), minimum temperature (tmn), maximum temperature (tmx), and potential evapotranspiration (pet). Gridded hydrologic variables include: actual evapotranspiration (aet), climatic water deficit (cwd), snowpack (pck), recharge (rch), runoff (run), and soil storage (str). The units for temperature variables are degrees Celsius, and all other variables are in millimeters. Monthly historical variables from water years 1896 to 2019 are summarized into water year files and long-term average summaries for water years 1981-2010. Four future climate scenarios were spatially downscaled from 6 kilometers to 270 meters, and run through the BCMv8 using the same model parameters. The future climate scenarios (Pierce et al., 2014) are all Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 and include: CanESM2, CNRM-CM5, HadGEM2-ES, and MIROC5 from California's Forth Climate Change Assessment. Future climate scenarios span from water year 2007 to 2099, and monthly variables were summarized by water year and the average 2070 to 2099 period. Streamflow for each calibration gage was calculated using a post processing Excel spreadsheet and BCMv8 recharge and runoff, and are provided in tabular comma separated *.csv files. Raster grids are in the NAD83 California Teale Albers, (meters) projection in an open format ascii text file (*.asc). 
References cited:
Daly, C., Halbleib, M., Smith, J.I., Gibson, W.P., Doggett, M.K., Taylor, G.H., Curtis, J. and Pasteris, P.P., 2008. Physiographically sensitive mapping of climatological temperature and precipitation across the conterminous United States. International Journal of Climatology: a Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 28(15), pp.2031-2064.
Flint, L.E., Flint, A.L., and Stern, M.A., 2021, The Basin Characterization Model - A monthly regional water balance software package (BCMv8) data release and model archive for hydrologic California (ver. 2.0, February 2023): U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9PT36UI.
Pierce, D.W., Cayan, D.R. and Thrasher, B.L., 2014. Statistical downscaling using localized constructed analogs (LOCA). Journal of hydrometeorology, 15(6), pp.2558-2585.

Tags: atmospheric-and-climatic-processes, california, climatologymeteorologyatmosphere, environment, evaporation, geoscientificinformation, hydrology, inlandwaters, mathematical-modeling, permeability, precipitation-atmospheric, snow-and-ice-cover, soil-moisture, streamflow, surface-water-non-marine, transpiration, united-states, usgs-5fce937bd34e30b91239709e, water-budget, water-cycle, water-resources, watershed-management
Organization: Department of the Interior