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A 21-yr gridded monthly fire-starts and acres-burned dataset from U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs fire reports recreates the seasonality and interannual variability of wildfire in the western United States. Despite pervasive human influence in western fire regimes, it is striking how strongly these data reveal a fire season responding to variations in climate. Correlating anomalous wildfire frequency and extent with the Palmer Drought Severity Index illustrates the importance of prior and accumulated precipitation anomalies for future wildfire season severity. This link to antecedent seasons' moisture conditions varies widely with differences in...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Hidalgo, H.G., Dettinger, M.D., and Cayan, D.C., 2008, Changes in Aridity in the Western United States: Californa Drought: An Update -- 2008, California Department of Water Resources, State of California, p. 54-59. (on-line report in pdf format, 4148 KB)
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Imagine a stream of water thousands of kilometers long and as wide as the distance between New York City and Washington, D. C., flowing toward you at 30 miles per hour. No, this is not some hypothetical physics problem—it is a real river, carrying more water than 7–15 Mississippi Rivers combined. But it is not on land. It's a river of water vapor in the atmosphere. Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are narrow corridors of water vapor transport in the lower atmosphere that traverse long swaths of the Earth's surface as they bind together the atmospheric water cycle (Figure 1). The characteristic (indeed defining) dimensions of these ARs are (1) integrated water vapor (IWV) concentrations such that if all the vapor in the...
Dettinger, M.D., Cayan, D.R., Meyer, M.K., and Jeton, A.E., 2004, Simulated hydrologic responses to climate variations and change in the Merced, Carson, and American River basins, Sierra Nevada, California, 1900-2099: Climatic Change, v. 62, no. 1, p. 283-317. (on-line abstract or on-line report in pdf format)
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
A new method for frequency analysis of hydrologic time series was developed to facilitate the estimation and reconstruction of individual or groups of frequencies from hydrologic time-series and facilitate the comparison of these isolated time-series components across data types, between different hydrologic settings within a watershed, between watersheds, and across frequencies. While climate-related variations in inflow to and outflow from aquifers have often been neglected, the development and management of ground-water and surface-water resources has required the inclusion of the assessment of the effects of climatic variability on the supply and demand and sustainability of use. The regional assessment of climatic...
Dettinger, M.D., and Earman, S., 2007, Western ground water and climate change - Pivotal to supply sustainability or vulnerable in its own right?: Ground Water News and Views, Association of Ground Water Scientists and Engineers Newsletter, v. 4, no. 1, p. 4-5. (on-line article in pdf format)
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Climate fluctuations are an environmental stress that must be factored into our designs for water resources, power, and other societal and environmental concerns. Under California's Mediterranean setting, winter and summer climate fluctuations both have important consequences. Winter climatic conditions determine the rates of water delivery to the state, and summer conditions determine most dem...
Cayan, D., VanScoy, M., Dettinger, M.D., and Helly, J., 2003, The wireless watershed at the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve: Southwest Hydrology, v. 2, no. 5, p. 18-19. (on-line article, in pdf format)
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Hidalgo, H.G., Dettinger, M.D., and Cayan, D.C., 2008, Downscaling With Constructed Analogues: Daily Precipitation and Temperature Fields Over The United States: California Energy Commission Report CEC-500-2007-123, 62 p. (on-line abstract or on-line report in pdf format, 2200 KB)
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Three statistical downscaling methods were applied to NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (used as a surrogate for the best possible general circulation model), and the downscaled meteorology was used to drive a hydrologic model over California. The historic record was divided into an "observed" period of 1950–1976 to provide the basis for downscaling, and a "projected" period of 1977–1999 for assessing skill. The downscaling methods included a bias-correction/spatial downscaling method (BCSD), which relies solely on monthly large scale meteorology and resamples the historical record to obtain daily sequences, a constructed analogues approach (CA), which uses daily large-scale anomalies, and a hybrid method (BCCA) using a quantile-mapping...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
This study examines the geographic structure of observed trends in key hydrologically relevant variables across the western United States at ⅛° spatial resolution during the period 1950–99. Geographical regions, latitude bands, and elevation classes where these trends are statistically significantly different from trends associated with natural climate variations are identified. Variables analyzed include late-winter and spring temperature, winter-total snowy days as a fraction of winter-total wet days, 1 April snow water equivalent (SWE) as a fraction of October–March (ONDJFM) precipitation total [precip(ONDJFM)], and seasonal [JFM] accumulated runoff as a fraction of water-year accumulated runoff. Observed changes...
Even in heavily engineered river systems, climate still governs flood variability and thus still drives many levee breaks and geomorphic changes. We assemble a 155-year record of levee breaks for a major California river system to find that breaks occurred in 25% of years during the 20th Century. A relation between levee breaks and river discharge is present that sets a discharge threshold above which most levee breaks occurred. That threshold corresponds to small floods with recurrence intervals of ∼2–3 years. Statistical analysis illustrates that levee breaks and peak discharges cycle (broadly) on a 12–15 year time scale, in time with warm-wet storm patterns in California, but more slowly or more quickly than...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Climate, geomorphology, levee break
Potential climate change effects on aspects of conjunctive management of water resources can be evaluated by linking climate models with fully integrated groundwater–surface water models. The objective of this study is to develop a modeling system that links global climate models with regional hydrologic models, using the California Central Valley as a case study. The new method is a supply and demand modeling framework that can be used to simulate and analyze potential climate change and conjunctive use. Supply-constrained and demand-driven linkages in the water system in the Central Valley are represented with the linked climate models, precipitation-runoff models, agricultural and native vegetation water use,...
Cayan, D., VanScoy, M., Dettinger, M.D., and Helly, J., 2003, The wireless watershed at the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve: Southwest Hydrology, v. 2, no. 5, p. 18-19. (on-line article, in pdf format)
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Dettinger, M.D., Hidalgo, H., Das, T., Cayan, D., and Knowles, N.,2009, Projections of potential flood regime changes in California: California Energy Commission Report, CEC-500-2009-050-D, 54 p. (on-line report in pdf format, 1702 KB)
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Earman, S., and Dettinger, M., 2008, Monitoring networks for long-term recharge change in the mountains of California and Nevada--A meeting report: California Energy Commission PIER Energy-Related Environmental Research Report CEC-500-2008-006, 32 p. (on-line report in pdf format, 203 KB)
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation