Predicted hydrology (intermittency) under drier climate conditions

Our objective was to model the risk of becoming intermittent under drier climate conditions on small, ungaged streams in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Modeling streamflows is an important tool for understanding landscape-scale drivers of flow and estimating flows where there are no gaged records. We focused our study in the Upper Colorado River Basin, a region that is not only critical for water resources but also projected to experience large future climate shifts toward a drier climate. We used a conditional inference modeling approach to model the relation between intermittency status on gaged streams (115 gages) and selected mean and minimum flow metrics. We then projected intermittency status and if a stream reach would be “threatened by intermittency” under a drier climate to ungaged reaches in the Upper Colorado River Basin using predicted minimum flow coefficient of variation (CV) and specific mean annual flow for each stream reach in the basin. This data layer shows modeled values of stream intermittency based on minimum flow CV and specific mean annual flow for each stream reach in the basin.