|
|
Climate policy developers and natural resource managers frequently desire high-resolution climate data to prepare for future effects of climate change. But they face a long-standing problem: the vast majority of climate models have been run at coarse resolutions—from hundreds of kilometers in global climate models (GCMs) down to 25–50 kilometers in regional climate models (RCMs).
|
Abstract (from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0174045): Several studies have projected increases in drought severity, extent and duration in many parts of the world under climate change. We examine sources of uncertainty arising from the methodological choices for the assessment of future drought risk in the continental US (CONUS). One such uncertainty is in the climate models’ expression of evaporative demand (E0), which is not a direct climate model output but has been traditionally estimated using several different formulations. Here we analyze daily output from two CMIP5 GCMs to evaluate how differences in E0 formulation, treatment of meteorological driving data, choice of GCM,...
|
Evaporative demand (E0) both drives and responds to droughts based on interactions across the land surface-atmosphere interface, and can be exploited to signal agricultural, hydrologic, and ecological droughts. In this chapter, we argue that using a fully physically based measure of E0 moves the drought community toward a more complete understanding of drought processes that will enhance its abilities with regard to early warning and drought monitoring in the present day and drought-risk assessment under future climate change scenarios. We examine regional characteristics in E0 and their behavior during droughts in the recent historical period across different hydroclimates. We review physical mechanisms driving...
|
An estimated 50–80% of North America’s ducks use the millions of wetland basins in the Prairie Pothole Region as breeding habitat. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) National Wildlife Refuge System has conserved approximately 1.3 million hectares of grasslands and wetlands in the United States portion of the Prairie Pothole Region with the primary purpose to support breeding duck habitat. A major assumption inherent to the current conservation approach is that wetlands that have historically provided the highest value to breeding ducks will continue to do so into the future. The dynamic nature of climate in the Northern Great Plains and continued increases in air temperatures and precipitation variability...
|
We mapped potential climate change refugia for riparian areas in the central and western USA for 2040-2069 and 2070-2099. Riparian refugia are existing riparian areas that are projected to maintain riparian vegetation and associated ecological function under plausible future climates. Four input variables were included in the riparian refugia index: two landscape variables that represent where existing riparian areas may be more resilient to climatic changes (riparian connectedness and landscape diversity) and two climate variables that reflect projected exposure to climate change (runoff and warm days). For the climate variables, we considered two global circulation models: moderately hot and wet (CNRM-CM5) and...
Tags: Climatology,
Colorado,
Idaho,
Kansas,
Montana, All tags...
Nebraska,
North Dakota,
South Dakota,
USGS Science Data Catalog (SDC),
Wildlife Biology,
Wyoming,
air temperature,
biota,
climate change,
climate refugia,
climatologyMeteorologyAtmosphere,
ecosystem resilience,
geospatial datasets,
riparian areas,
runoff, Fewer tags
|
View more...
|
