Modeling the impacts of climate change on water quality in lake Champlain: Design of an integrated assessment model using Pegasus scientific workflow

The Research on Adaptation to Climate Change (RACC) scientists study the Lake Champlain Basin (LCB) as a coupled human and natural system with climate-change and human drivers. In this effort, social scientists and natural scientists collaborate with stakeholders to develop an Integrated Assessment Model (IAModel) for basin management. We present an IAModel scientific workflow to answer the question: "How will the interaction of climate-change, human induced land-use, hydrological processes and public policies alter nutrient transport in the LCB?" The IAModel is calibrated to the observed remote sensing and water quality monitoring systems in LCB. The workflow is comprised of (1) Climate projections for daily precipitation and temperature for our study area are downscaled to a finer spatial resolution from global climate models (GCMs). The downscaling process adds information to the GCM projections by accounting for topographic and latitudinal differences across our study region. (2) A Land-use transition agent-based model component (ILUTABM): simulates heterogeneity in land use decisions at parcel levels (3) A Watershed Hydrology component to simulate the physical impact of climate and land-use using the Regional Hydro-Ecological Simulation System (RHESSys) (4) Coupled 3-D hydrodynamic and water quality model (EFDC-RCA): simulates the response of multiple biotic and abiotic indicators of Lake Champlain water quality to changes in climate and land-use. This workflow is designed using Pegasus Workflow Management System, which has been the leading workflow environment for virtually any scientific domains. IAM-Pegasus can run on a local Vermont Cluster and nationwide High Performance Computing clusters (e.g., Yellowstone).