Hydropower

Accurate predictions of freshwater discharge from the Greenland Ice Sheet are increasingly important for hydropower planning. Together with our key stakeholder Asiaq - Greenland Survey, we are developing a Functional Time Series (FTS) module within DTC-IS that can be used to predict proglacial discharge from a key land-terminating Greenland catchment relevant to planned hydropower expansion. While increased summer melting may temporarily boost electricity production, long-term changes could reduce steady inflows in key areas. Planning resilient hydropower systems for a warming climate therefore depends on understanding how ice-sheet hydrology will evolve.

The model is driven by a probabilistic datacube constructed within the digital twin using a Gaussian Random Field (GRF) module, which integrates multiple meltwater-relevant Earth Observation datasets on a common multi-dimensional grid capturing space, time, variable type and uncertainty. This datacube is used to force the multivariate FTS model, which captures strong seasonal melt cycles, longer-term climate variability, and time lags between surface melt and downstream discharge, while exploiting correlations between meltwater components to improve skill.

Forcing data include:
  • Runoff estimates from the RACMO, MAR, and HIRHAM regional climate models
  • Elevation change measurements generated through the EO4SMB project
  • Supraglacial lake extents generated through the 4D Greenland project
  • Basal melting estimates generated through the 4D Greenland project

Predictions of total annual discharge and seasonal timing are validated against in situ discharge measurements. The workflow can be used in a Jupyter notebook to explore changes in pro-glacial discharge under future, warmer, climate scenarios. The GRF-FTS methodology is designed to be readily generalisable within the Digital Twin framework; supporting application to other catchments and stakeholder use cases.

What ifs:
  • What if future regional climate evolves in different ways? How do RCP/SSP scenarios impact the expected development of ice sheet impact on hydropower-impacting discharge?
  • What if we don't have a clear idea where water is flowing off the ice sheet? How does uncertainty in sub- and supra-glacial water routing for catchments impact the strength of our predictions?
Hydropower Jupyter Notebook

Excerpt from the Hydropower Jupyter Notebook Demonstrator.