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ColoradoRiverScience.Org is being created to provide a clearinghouse about science and data about the Colorado River. | ColoradoRiverScience.Org is being created to provide a clearinghouse about science and data about the Colorado River. | ||
Revision as of 11:24, 7 April 2021
ColoradoRiverScience.Org is being created to provide a clearinghouse about science and data about the Colorado River.
It is intended for use by Decision Makers, Scientists, Students, the Press, and the Public.
To obtain a login to allow editing, please contact the site administrator below.
Edits are subject to review and will not be made public until approved.
This site is under construction as of 1/21/2020. Currently, a skeleton is in place to allow prototyping and initial design.
You might find this page to be of use as we build the site. It is a live ongoing compilation of relevant publications.
Contact Brad Udall Bradley.udall @ colostate.edu for information.
Page purpose: Here we show recent scientific, news and policy articles. An archive of older articles will also be accessible as older articles are displaced by newer articles over time.
Recent Scientific Papers
Emily Williams
Chris Funk
Shraddhanand Shukla
Daniel McEvoy
January 23, 2020
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
Summary
Human-induced (HI) warming increased Four Corners’ vapor pressure deficits and reduced the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index by ~18%–30%. Without HI warming, March snow water equivalent would have been ~20% higher.
[[1]]
C.A. Woodhouse
D.M. Meko
E.R. Bigio
First published: 08 January 2020
Journal of the American Water Resources Association
Abstract
The impact of drought on water resources in arid and semiarid regions can be buffered by water supplies from different source regions. Simultaneous drought in all major source regions — or perfect drought — poses the most serious challenge to water management. We examine perfect droughts relevant to Southern California (SoCal) water resources with instrumental records and tree‐ring reconstructions for the Sacramento and Colorado Rivers, and SoCal. Perfect droughts have occurred five times since 1906, lasting two to three years, except for the most recent event, 2012–2015. This number and duration of perfect droughts is not unusual in the context of the past six centuries. The modern period stands out for the relatively even distribution of perfect droughts and lacks the clusters of perfect drought documented in prior centuries. In comparison, perfect droughts of the 12th Century were both longer (up to nine years) and more widespread. Perfect droughts of the 20th and 21st Centuries have occurred under different oceanic/atmospheric patterns, zonal and meridional flow, and ENSO or non‐ENSO conditions. Multidecadal coherence across the three regions exists, but it has varied over the past six centuries, resulting in irregular intervals of perfect drought. Although the causes of perfect droughts are not clear, given the long‐term natural variability along with projected changes in climate, it is reasonable to expect more frequent and longer perfect droughts in the future.
Scott M. Robeson,
Justin T. Maxwell,
Darren L. Ficklin
January 3, 2020
Geophysical Research Letters
Key points
- Bias correction makes paleoclimatic models more comparable to observations
- After bias correction, the 1100s Colorado River megadrought became more extreme
- The early 1600s Colorado River pluvial rivals that of the early 20th century after bias correction
Plain Language Summary
To study past climates, scientists use indicators such as tree‐ring widths that are related to temperature, precipitation, or streamflow. While these indicators usually are very reliable, they sometimes do not perform as well with extreme events such as intense droughts and wet periods. Here, we adopt a method that can correct for these limitations and apply it to a 1,200+year record of streamflow for the Upper Colorado River, a critical source of water for much of the southwestern United States. After using our method, we find that several extreme events from the tree‐ring record of streamflow were even more intense than formerly thought. In particular, the largest drought in the record that occurred during the 1100s was drier and longer lasting after our correction. During the 56‐year duration of the 1100s drought, our correction makes the flow in the river lower by nearly 52 × 109 m3 of water, which is the equivalent of 1.45 times the capacity of Lake Mead (the largest reservoir in the United States). And, while it was known that the early 1900s was among the wettest periods in the last 1,200+ years, we identify a period in the early 1600s that matches it.
Recent News Articles
January 23, 2020
We know the earth is warming. We know that will stress water in the West. But we don’t know how.
January 22, 2020
Mark Jaffe
Colorado Sun
Short Summary
Two critical, big-picture questions loom: How much snow will fall in the mountains and how much water will there be for the region’s forests, farms and cities.
Natasha Noy Research Scientist, Google Research Published Jan 23, 2020
From the First Paragraph
Across the web, there are millions of datasets about nearly any subject that interests you. If you’re looking to buy a puppy, you could find datasets compiling complaints of puppy buyers or studies on puppy cognition. Or if you like skiing, you could find data on revenue of ski resorts or injury rates and participation numbers. Dataset Search has indexed almost 25 million of these datasets, giving you a single place to search for datasets and find links to where the data is. Over the past year, people have tried it out and provided feedback, and now Dataset Search is officially out of beta.
Website
Recent Policy Articles
Strategies for Managing the Colorado River in an Uncertain Future
Complete White Paper Two Page Brief
Jian Wang, David E. Rosenberg, Kevin G. Wheeler, John C. Schmidt February 12, 2020
Understanding What We Don't Know
Colorado River stakeholders face many uncertainties—issues like climate change, future water demand, and evolving ecological priorities—and are looking for new tools to help cope. Managers and stakeholders need ways to help classify uncertain conditions, manage for them, and create models in the face of a slew of oncoming unknowns.
To help Colorado River stakeholders think about, talk about, and better manage the future river, the Center for Colorado River Studies offers a new white paper that distinguishes four levels of decision-making uncertainty. We illustrate each level of uncertainty with examples and show that there is greater uncertainty associated with planning for long time horizons, such as in developing policies that anticipate the increasing possibility of drought, extreme climate events, and unknown patterns of future human use of water. We argue that better public policies will emerge if stakeholders recognize the different levels of uncertainty for future events.
Using defined levels of uncertainty can guide stakeholders to appropriate management and modeling tools and lead to more precise and effective conversation and negotiation.
From the paper: Suggested Practices for an Uncertain Future
- Classify uncertainties by level.
- Include and track more information as it becomes available.
- Define more signposts to signal when future water supply and river ecosystem outcomes deteriorate and trigger an alternative policy.
- Identify more alternative policies for when circumstances trigger a signpost.
- Construct potential pathways that connect signposts and alternative policies over time.
- Match the planning horizon to the uncertainty level.
- Retain more reservoir storage at the end of the model planning horizon to save water for future managers and generations to use.
- Seek better policies that improve water supply and river ecosystem outcomes across more future scenarios, rather than best policies.
- Allow users more flexibility to respond to changing conditions.
- Visualize adaptive policies to show system adaptations over time, identify gaps in policies, and adapt policies to include more information and signposts.
The Risk of Curtailment under the Colorado River Compact
[[2]]
Anne Castle
John Fleck
[Summary via Utah State University]