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Abstract (from AGU 100): This study investigates snowmelt and streamflow responses to cloudiness variability across the mountainous parts of the western United States. Twenty years (1996–2015) of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite‐derived cloud cover indices (CC) with 4‐km spatial and daily temporal resolutions are used as a proxy for cloudiness. The primary driver of nonseasonal fluctuations in daily mean solar insolation is the fluctuating cloudiness. We find that CC fluctuations are related to snowmelt and snow‐fed streamflow fluctuations, to some extent (correlations of <0.5). Multivariate linear regression models of daily snowmelt (MELT) and streamflow (ΔQ) variations are constructed for each...
Over the past four decades, annual area burned has increased significantly in California and across the western USA. This trend reflects a confluence of intersecting factors that affect wildfire regimes. It is correlated with increasing temperatures and atmospheric vapour pressure deficit. Anthropogenic climate change is the driver behind much of this change, in addition to influencing other climate-related factors, such as compression of the winter wet season. These climatic trends and associated increases in fire activity are projected to continue into the future. Additionally, factors related to the suppression of the Indigenous use of fire, aggressive fire suppression and, in some cases, changes in logging practices...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Natural climate variability can strongly temporarily enhance or obscure long-term trends in regional weather due to global climate change. We planned to explore (from our original proposal): (1) The influence of low frequency climate variability (interannual and decadal) on the seasonal probability distributions of daily weather (temperature and precipitation) within the Southwest, with a view on how natural variability modulates regional trends due to global warming. We explored natural climate variability and its impacts on extreme temperatures in Guirguis et al. (2015). We also explored natural climate variability and its impacts on precipitation extremes in Cavanaugh et al. (2015), Cavanugh and Gershunov (2015)...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Abstract Coastal marsh within Mediterranean climate zones is exposed to episodic watershed runoff and sediment loads that occur during storm events. Simulating future marsh accretion under sea level rise calls for attention to: (a) physical processes acting over the time scale of storm events and (b) biophysical processes acting over time scales longer than storm events. Using the upper Newport Bay in Southern California as a case study, we examine the influence of event-scale processes on simulated change in marsh topography by comparing: (a) a biophysical model that integrates with an annual time step and neglects event-scale processes (BP-Annual), (b) a physical model that resolves event-scale processes but...
The Conserving Climate Change Refugia for the Mojave Ecosystem workshop was held virtually via zoom on Wednesday, December 9, 2019, using funding from the Southwest Climate and the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Centers (SW and NE CASCs). The objectives of this workshop were to bring together natural resource managers and researchers to 1) learn about current work in the Mojave ecoregion related to climate adaptation, 2) prioritize focal species/ecosystems for climate change refugia conservation/funding, and 3) identify research gaps, all in service of operationalizing climate change adaptation strategies in the Mojave ecoregion. The meeting began with presentations by researchers and resource managers who...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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This data release contains monthly 270-meter resolution Basin Characterization Model (BCMv8) climate and hydrologic variables for Localized Constructed Analog (LOCA; Pierce et al., 2014)-downscaled Global Climate Models (GCMs) for Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 (medium-low emissions) and 8.5 (high emissions) for hydrologic California. The 20 future climate scenarios consist of ten GCMs with RCP 4.5 and 8.5 each: ACCESS 1.0, CanESM2, CCSM4, CESM1-BGC, CMCC-CMS, CNRM-CM5, GFDL-CM3, HadGEM2-CC, HadGEM2-ES, and MIROC5. The LOCA climate scenarios span water years 1950 to 2099 with greenhouse-gas forcings beginning in 2006. The LOCA downscaling method has been shown to produce better estimates of extreme...
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Fire has always been a part of life in southern California. Climate change and current fire management practices have led to catastrophic losses and impacts to human health, infrastructure and ecosystems, as seen, for example, in the 2018 Montecito debris flow. Indigenous wisdom instructs that rather than suppressing fire, we should seek to be in good relationship with fire. This project centers the voices of Chumash people by revitalizing their good relationship with fire in Chumash homelands. This revitalization comes at a critical time for both fire management and revitalization of Indigenous cultural burning practices in the southwest. The project will enable the recovery and documenting of Chumash knowledge...
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The 2017 fire season in California was highly unusual with its late seasonal timing, the areal extent it burned, and its devastation to communities. These fires were associated with extreme winds and were potentially also influenced by unusually dry conditions during several years leading up to the 2017 events. This fire season brought additional attention and emphasized the vital need for managers in the western U.S. to have access to scientific information on when and where to expect dangerous fire events. Understanding the multiple factors that cause extreme wildfire events is critical to short and long-term forecasting and planning. Seasonal climate measures such as temperature and precipitation are commonly...
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Drought and wildfire pose enormous threats to the integrity of natural resources that land managers are charged with protecting. Recent observations and modeling forecasts indicate that these stressors will likely produce catastrophic ecosystem transformations, or abrupt changes in the condition of plants, wildlife, and their habitats, in regions across the country in coming decades. In this project, researchers will bring together land managers who have experienced various degrees of ecosystem transformation (from not yet experiencing any changes to seeing large changes across the lands they manage) to share their perspectives on how to mitigate large-scale changes in land condition. The team will conduct surveys...
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Natural resource managers and researchers often need long-term averages of historical and future climate scenarios for their study area yet may not have the resources to make these summaries. This project will provide high quality, detailed maps of historical and projected future climate and hydrologic conditions for California and a finer scale version for southern California. The project will also assess the feasibility of expanding these reference data to the southwestern US and identify the most suitable online data portals for the public to view and analyze the data in support of local initiatives. The map products can be used to assess the impacts of ongoing climate change and to develop climate adaptation...
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Declining water levels in the Great Salt Lake are part of a larger trend of decreasing water availability in the Southwestern U.S. that presents significant challenges for people, animals, and ecosystems. One challenge is that as some lakes dry, newly exposed sediment containing heavy metals can become toxic dust that blows into populated areas. Increased air pollution and other effects of drying lakes make it critical to understand and improve decision-making for shrinking lake management. The goal of this project is to work with communities around the Great Salt Lake to understand their experiences of decreasing water levels and to ultimately help resource managers and communities develop effective, inclusive,...
(Abstract from Taylor & Francis Online): In response to the wildfire crisis across the American West, governments are increasing investments in forest health. Guidelines for these investments often include environmental justice (EJ) provisions. However, current processes for addressing EJ aren’t consistently meeting the needs of communities in forested areas. We analyze one source of wildfire mitigation funds in California, Forest Health Grants, to assess its adherence to distributive, procedural, and Indigenous aspects of EJ. We find that this program is not necessarily serving “disadvantaged” communities according to the State’s definition. We argue that current metrics for identifying “disadvantaged” communities...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from AMS100): Between water years 2012 and 2017, the Truckee–Carson river system in the western United States experienced both historic-low and record-high Sierra Nevada snowpack, anomalously warm temperatures, and winter and spring flooding. As part of an ongoing collaborative modeling research program in the river system, researchers conduct annual interviews with key local water managers to characterize local climate adaptation strategies and implementation barriers, and identify science information needs to prioritize ongoing research activities. This article presents new findings from a third wave of interviews conducted with the same water managers following the historic 2017 wet year. Comparison...
Abstract (from AMS): The upper Colorado River basin (UCRB) is one of the primary sources of water for the western United States, and increasing temperatures likely will elevate the risk of reduced water supply in the basin. Although variability in water-year precipitation explains more of the variability in water-year UCRB streamflow than water-year UCRB temperature, since the late 1980s, increases in temperature in the UCRB have caused a substantial reduction in UCRB runoff efficiency (the ratio of streamflow to precipitation). These reductions in flow because of increasing temperatures are the largest documented temperature-related reductions since record keeping began. Increases in UCRB temperature over the past...
Climate change’s threat to the identity, culture, economy, and livelihoods of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe (PLPT) can be better understood through community-engaged participatory methods. Our research team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scientists formed a tribal-university partnership with the PLPT Council to understand how climate change and upstream pressures threaten PLPT ecosystems, lands, and resources. The objectives are to: (1) consider how decolonizing, Indigenizing, and participatory methodologies can inform climate research engagement between scientists and Indigenous partners; (2) understand PLPT perspectives of climate change impacts and priorities for climate research; and (3) engage the PLPT community...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from RMetS): Over the Upper Colorado River basin (UCRB), temperatures in widely used gridded data products do not warm as much as mean temperatures from a stable set of U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations, located at generally lower elevations, in most months of the year. This is contrary to expectations of elevation‐dependent warming, which suggests that warming increases with elevation. These findings could reflect (a) a genuine absence of elevation‐dependent warming in the region, (b) systematic non‐climatic influences on either the USHCN stations or high‐elevation stations, including known inhomogeneities related to changes in the time of observation and instrumentation, or (c) suppression...
Incorporating climate change considerations into land management and species conservation remains challenging for natural resource managers, because other stressors such as drought or invasive species currently have a larger impact. Thus, it is often difficult to prioritize long-term goals when resources for the immediate needs of species are already difficult to secure. This project aims to combine the latest decision science with climate change refugia modeling to create a novel decision-framework that emphasizes a collaborative approach to complex management issues, which aims to bridge the gap between managing for current priorities and long-term climate change adaptation. In doing so, this framework will be...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
(Abstract from AMS Journals): Researchers are producing an ever greater number of web-based climate data and analysis tools in support of natural resource research and management. Yet the apparent absence or underreporting of evaluation in the development of these applications has raised questions as to whether, by whom, and for what they are utilized, and, relatedly, whether they meet the rationale for their development. This paper joins recent efforts to address these questions by introducing one approach to evaluation—developmental evaluation—and reporting on its use in the evaluation of the Southwest Climate and Environmental Information Collaborative (SCENIC). A web interface under development at the Western...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
(Abstract from Springer): There is increasing interest among scholars in producing information that is useful and usable to land and natural resource managers in a changing climate. This interest has prompted transitions from scientist- to stakeholder-driven or collaborative approaches to climate science. A common indicator of successful collaboration is whether stakeholders use the information resulting from the projects in which they are engaged. However, detailed examples of how stakeholders use climate information are relatively scarce in the literature, leading to a challenge in understanding what researchers can and should expect and plan for in terms of stakeholder use of research findings. Drawing on theoretical,...
map background search result map search result map Preventing Extreme Fire Events by Learning from History: The Effects of Wind, Temperature, and Drought Extremes on Fire Activity Learning From the Past and Planning for the Future: Experience-Driven Insight Into Managing for Ecosystem Transformations Induced by Drought and Wildfire Future Climate and Hydrology from Twenty Localized Constructed Analog (LOCA) Scenarios and the Basin Characterization Model (BCMv8) Cycles of Renewal: Returning Good Fire to the Chumash Homelands Multi-Decadal Simulation of Marsh Topography Under Sea Level Rise and Episodic Sediment Loads Rendering High-Resolution Hydro-Climatic Data for Southern California Mapping Community Experiences and Concerns Related to Drying Lakes in Arid Climates Multi-Decadal Simulation of Marsh Topography Under Sea Level Rise and Episodic Sediment Loads Cycles of Renewal: Returning Good Fire to the Chumash Homelands Mapping Community Experiences and Concerns Related to Drying Lakes in Arid Climates Preventing Extreme Fire Events by Learning from History: The Effects of Wind, Temperature, and Drought Extremes on Fire Activity Future Climate and Hydrology from Twenty Localized Constructed Analog (LOCA) Scenarios and the Basin Characterization Model (BCMv8) Rendering High-Resolution Hydro-Climatic Data for Southern California Learning From the Past and Planning for the Future: Experience-Driven Insight Into Managing for Ecosystem Transformations Induced by Drought and Wildfire