The Canada’s Changing Climate Report (www.changingclimate.ca/CCCR2019), led by Environment and Climate Change Canada, is about how and why Canada’s climate has changed and what changes are projected for the future. Datasets supporting the results produced for the Canada’s Changing Climate report are available. Please visit Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Canadian Centre for Climate Services to explore general historical climate data and future climate projections for Canada, and the Canadian Climate Data and Scenarios website (www.climate-scenarios.canada.ca) for more detailed historical climate data and climate model projections. Additional datasets unavailable elsewhere are available here for direct download. This includes datasets of multi-model climate change projections for Canada by region for 2031-2050 under the low-emission (RCP2.6) and high emission (RCP8.5) scenarios.

High-resolution ground terrain elevational data are key to assessing habitat conditions, surface water connectivity and environmental change in the Peace-Athabasca Delta (PAD), Northern Alberta. LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technology that has recently become more common in geospatial related projects and is currently one of the best methods for surveying large areas to obtain surface elevations. As part of the Oil Sands Monitoring (OSM) Program, aerial LiDAR surveys were conducted over approximately 3500 km2 of the PAD at the end of summer 2019 to cover spatial data gaps. The LiDAR point cloud elevational data are offered as 1 km2 tiles of classified (unclassified, ground, low point noise, water, high noise) referenced to UTM NAD83 (CSRS) Zone 12 horizontal and CGVD2013 (Epoch 2010) vertical reference systems, with a RMSE of approximately 0.10 m. Following the Government of Canada Open Data initiative, this original elevational data set is available to the public.

A high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) is key to assessing habitat conditions, surface water connectivity, developing hydraulic models, and environmental change in the Peace-Athabasca Delta (PAD), Northern Alberta. Note that in this instance, DEM is a representation of the ground surface elevations and is thus considered synonymous with a digital terrain model. As part of the Oil Sands Monitoring (OSM) Program, the PAD DEM v1 was derived solely from airborne LiDAR surveys carried out since 2000 through multiple projects with different partners and collaborators, with the bulk of the area surveyed in 2019. Hence, the vertical accuracy varies spatially depending on the technology/method used in individual aerial surveys, as well as if a pixel was filled in via interpolation due to a lack of LiDAR ground data returns in very dense deltaic floodplain vegetation. Furthermore, it does not include traditional ground-based elevation survey data and bathymetric elevations, nor surface water extents for the multiple lakes, wetlands and channels – addition of these data will form part of a planned future version of this DEM product. Given that the DEM has yet to be tested and is a work in progress, the quality, accuracy or completeness is not warranted. The PAD DEM v1 is provided as a 4 m horizontal resolution product that is projected to the UTM NAD83 (CSRS) Zone 12 coordinate system and is referenced to the Canadian Geodetic Vertical Datum of 2013 (CGVD2013) Epoch 2010.