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The distribution and abundance of cheatgrass, an invasive annual grass native to Eurasia, has increased substantially across the Intermountain West, including the Great Basin. Cheatgrass is highly flammable, and as it has expanded, the extent and frequency of fire in the Great Basin has increased by as much as 200%. These changes in fire regimes are associated with loss of the native sagebrush, grasses, and herbaceous flowering plants that provide habitat for many native animals, including Greater Sage-Grouse. Changes in vegetation and fire management have been suggested with the intent of conserving Greater Sage-Grouse. However, the potential responses of other sensitive-status birds to these changes in management...
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: 2015,
Birds,
Birds,
Bodie Hills-Pine Nut Mountains,
CASC,
Future changes in the number of dry days per year can either reinforce or counteract projected increases in daily precipitation intensity as the climate warms. We analyze climate model projected changes in the number of dry days using 28 coupled global climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, version 5 (CMIP5). We find that the Mediterranean Sea region, parts of Central and South America, and western Indonesia could experience up to 30 more dry days per year by the end of this century. We illustrate how changes in the number of dry days and the precipitation intensity on precipitating days combine to produce changes in annual precipitation, and show that over much of the subtropics the change...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Data Visualization & Tools,
Science Tools for Managers,
Southwest CASC,
climate,
precipitation
A new method for automatic detection of atmospheric rivers (ARs) is developed and applied to an atmospheric reanalysis, yielding an extensive catalog of ARs land-falling along the west coast of North America during 1948–2017. This catalog provides a large array of variables that can be used to examine AR cases and their climate-scale variability in exceptional detail. The new record of AR activity, as presented, validated and examined here, provides a perspective on the seasonal cycle and the interannual-interdecadal variability of AR activity affecting the hydroclimate of western North America. Importantly, AR intensity does not exactly follow the climatological pattern of AR frequency. Strong links to hydroclimate...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather,
Southwest CASC
Our objective was to quantitatively characterize the landscape of climate-relevant resource decisions in the southwestern United States. We worked with stakeholders to determine actual uses of climate-relevant information used in natural resource decisions. We used content analysis of federal register records of decisions and stakeholder consultative groups to develop a survey of decision makers querying the use of climate information in decisions. We sought to create a classification of decisions attributes, information needs, and decision processes that rely on climate science. We sought to engage stakeholder consultative groups to define mechanisms for best filtering, delivering and interpreting what has become...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Data Visualization & Tools,
Decision Making,
Science Tools For Managers,
Social Science,
Southwest CASC
Abstract (from http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.3417/2017006): The Earth system is undergoing rapid, profound anthropogenic change. The primary axes of change include not only the climate system, but also the spread of invasive species, altered biogeochemical and hydrological cycles, modified disturbance regimes, and land degradation and conversion. These factors are influencing the distribution of species and the structure and function of ecosystems worldwide, interacting with climatic stressors that may preclude the persistence of many current species distributions and communities. Ecological disturbances such as wildfires and insect outbreaks can interact with climate variability to precipitate abrupt change...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Drought,
Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
Fire,
Southwest CASC
Streamflow in the Colorado River is heavily influenced by high-elevation snowpack. Warming temperatures in spring can reduce snow-fed flows, with serious implications for the water supplies that support communities and wildlife. While it is already well-known that precipitation has a significant influence on river flow, recent observations suggest that temperature and the amount of water in soil may also influence streamflow. In the face of a changing climate, it is important that resource managers understand how factors such as changing temperatures and precipitation will affect this vital water source. To address this need, researchers are examining records of streamflow, temperature, soil moisture, and precipitation...
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: 2014,
CASC,
Completed,
Drought,
Drought,
How quickly a lake fills after water is drawn for irrigation or drinking is easily measured, but that’s not true for underground water reserves, called aquifers. Because it takes place belowground, groundwater replenishment—or recharge—can’t be directly observed. Scientists must estimate it, often by using complex mathematical models. A new screening tool may now ease the task.
This project links climate, hydrological, and ecological changes over the next 30 years in a Great Basin watershed. In recent years, climate variability on annual and decadal time scales has been recognized as greater than commonly perceived with increasing impacts on ecosystems and available water resources. Changes in vegetation distribution, composition and productivity resulting from climate change affect plant water use, which in turn can alter stream flow, groundwater and eventually available water resources. To better understand these links, project researchers implemented two computer-based numeric models in the Cleve Creek watershed in the Schell Creek Range, east of Ely, Nevada. The application of the...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Rivers, Streams and Lakes,
Southwest CASC,
Water, Coasts and Ice
Abstract (from http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JHM-D-16-0194.1): This study investigates the spatial and temporal variability of cloudiness across mountain zones in the western United States. Daily average cloud albedo is derived from a 19-yr series (1996–2014) of half-hourly Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) images. During springtime when incident radiation is active in driving snowmelt–runoff processes, the magnitude of daily cloud variations can exceed 50% of long-term averages. Even when aggregated over 3-month periods, cloud albedo varies by ±10% of long-term averages in many locations. Rotated empirical orthogonal functions (REOFs) of daily cloud albedo anomalies over high-elevation...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather,
Southwest CASC
Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL067613/full): This empirical study examines the influence of precipitation, temperature, and antecedent soil moisture on upper Colorado River basin (UCRB) water year streamflow over the past century. While cool season precipitation explains most of the variability in annual flows, temperature appears to be highly influential under certain conditions, with the role of antecedent fall soil moisture less clear. In both wet and dry years, when flow is substantially different than expected given precipitation, these factors can modulate the dominant precipitation influence on streamflow. Different combinations of temperature, precipitation, and soil moisture...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Colorado River,
Drought,
Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
Rivers, Streams and Lakes,
Southwest CASC,
Abstract (from http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JHM-D-14-0236.1): Global climate model (GCM) output typically needs to be bias corrected before it can be used for climate change impact studies. Three existing bias correction methods, and a new one developed here, are applied to daily maximum temperature and precipitation from 21 GCMs to investigate how different methods alter the climate change signal of the GCM. The quantile mapping (QM) and cumulative distribution function transform (CDF-t) bias correction methods can significantly alter the GCM’s mean climate change signal, with differences of up to 2°C and 30% points for monthly mean temperature and precipitation, respectively. Equidistant quantile...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Bias,
Data Visualization & Tools,
Modeling,
Science Tools for Managers,
Southwest CASC,
Native Americans in the Southwest United States are thought to be particularly vulnerable to climate change. Tribal resiliency to climate change can be affected by multiple climate-related threats and by tribal communities’ close reliance on natural resources for sustenance, economic development, and maintenance of cultural traditions. A scientifically rigorous assessment of such threats to Native Americans is a pressing need across southwestern landscapes. This project examined factors affecting Native American tribes, including water rights for fish and wildlife, protection of wetlands, and enhancement and recovery of the Pyramid Lake, Nevada fishery, and protection of important fish species. This project aimed...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Fish,
Indigenous Peoples,
Native Americans,
Rivers, Streams and Lakes,
Science Tools For Managers,
The impacts of different emission levels and climate change conditions to landscape-scale natural vegetation could have large repercussions for ecosystem services and environmental health. We forecast the risk-reduction benefits to natural landscapes of lowering business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions by comparing the extent and spatial patterns of climate exposure to dominant vegetation under current emissions trajectories (Representative Concentration Pathway, RCP8.5) and envisioned Paris Accord target emissions (RCP4.5). This comparison allows us to assess the ecosystem value of reaching targets to keep global temperature warming under 2°C. Using 350,719 km2 of natural lands in California, USA, and the mapped...
Abstract (from http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/WCAS-D-16-0008.1): Resource managers and decision-makers are increasingly tasked with integrating climate change science into their decisions about resource management and policy development. This often requires climate scientists, resource managers, and decision-makers to work collaboratively throughout the research processes, an approach to knowledge development that is often called “coproduction of knowledge.” The goal of this paper is to synthesize the social science theory of coproduction of knowledge, the metrics currently used to evaluate usable or actionable science in several federal agencies, and insights from experienced climate researchers and...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Data Visualization & Tools,
Decision Making,
Science Tools For Managers,
Social Science,
Southwest CASC,
California’s Central Valley is a nexus for water resources in the state, draining the Sacramento and San Joaquin River watersheds. Urban centers, agricultural operations, and the environment all compete for limited water, and demand is expected to only increase as the population grows and agriculture intensifies. At the same time, the water supply is projected to decrease as temperatures rise, precipitation patterns change, and the frequency of extreme droughts increases. The Central Valley also provides critical wetland habitats to migratory waterbirds, and wetland managers require information on how to best use water resources to support wildlife objectives, particularly during drought. This project seeks to...
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: 2015,
Birds,
Birds,
CASC,
Completed,
Forests across the southwestern U.S. are crucial components of recreation and play an important role in state and local economies. Healthy forests also provide needed habitat for many wildlife species and contribute many other important services to our planet. “Hotter droughts” (otherwise normal droughts whose effects on ecosystems are exacerbated by higher temperatures) are an emerging climate change threat to forests with some of their earliest and strongest appearances happening in the Southwest. The Leaf to Landscape project uses California’s unusually hot drought as a potential preview of the future, allowing us to collect information that will help guide forest management in the face of a warming climate....
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: 2016,
CASC,
Completed,
Data Visualization & Tools,
Data Visualization & Tools,
In many places around the world, spring events, like warming temperatures, are coming earlier and fall events are coming later than they have in the past. These changes have implications for the phenology, or the timing of natural life events (e.g. the timing of plant flowering in Spring or leaves falling in Autumn), of many plant species. However, not all species and regions are changing at the same rate, which can lead to mismatches (e.g. between the emergence of plants and pollinators in early spring). Many interactions in nature depend on timing and, as such, phenology affects nearly all aspects of the environment, including the abundance, distribution, and diversity of organisms, ecosystem services, food webs,...
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service,
Report;
Tags: 2017,
CASC,
Completed,
Data Visualization & Tools,
Data Visualization & Tools,
Abstract (from http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00289.1): There is an increasing demand for climate science that decision-makers can readily use to address issues created by climate variability and climate change. To be usable, the science must be relevant to their context and the complex management challenges they face and credible and legitimate in their eyes. The literature on usable science provides guiding principles for its development, which indicate that climate scientists who want to participate in the process need skills in addition to their traditional disciplinary training to facilitate communicating, interacting, and developing and sustaining relationships with stakeholders outside...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Coproduction,
Data Visualization & Tools,
Science Tools For Managers,
Social Science,
Southwest CASC
Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eco.1723/full): Quantifying the regulation of precipitation-associated vegetation dynamics on land surface water balance poses a particular challenge in current eco-hydrological studies because terrestrial ecological processes interact with hydrological processes, and both are subject to precipitation change. The objective of this study is to examine how precipitation change-associated vegetation dynamics may regulate catchment water balance in a semiarid to arid mountain ecosystem. To achieve this objective, R-RHESSys, which is short for rasterised regional hydro-ecological simulation system, a distributed hydro-ecological model, was applied to the Cleve...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Plants,
Rivers, Streams and Lakes,
Southwest CASC,
Water,
Water, Coasts and Ice
Atmospheric rivers (ARs), narrow atmospheric water vapor corridors, can contribute substantially to winter precipitation in the semiarid Southwest U.S., where natural ecosystems and humans compete for over-allocated water resources. We investigate the hydrologic impacts of 122 ARs that occurred in the Salt and Verde river basins in northeastern Arizona during the cold seasons from 1979 to 2009. We focus on the relationship between precipitation, snow water equivalent (SWE), soil moisture, and extreme flooding. During the cold season (October through March) ARs contribute an average of 25%/29% of total seasonal precipitation for the Salt/Verde river basins, respectively. However, they contribute disproportionately...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Rivers, Streams and Lakes,
Southwest CASC,
Water, Coasts and Ice
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