WCR: Coupled Climatic-Hydrologic Change in the Terrestrial Water Cycle of North America in the 20th and 21st Centuries: Natural Variability and Anthropogenic Impacts

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This interdisciplinary project team has recently built a new modeling system for exploring coupled climatic-hydrologic processes by fully integrating all surface and subsurface terrestrial reservoirs, and their governing dynamics, into a state-of-the-art regional climate model, the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS). With this tool, i.e., RAMS-Hydrology, the project team will produce downscaled scenarios of regional climate change impacts on the terrestrial water cycle and investigate the two-way interactions between the atmospheric, surface, and subsurface reservoirs that modulate these impacts. The study will employ the model, along with current understanding of large-scale climate variability over the past decades and estimates of the range of potential global climate changes in the future, to examine coupled climate and water cycle change over North America in the 20th and 21st centuries. First a post-doctoral research associate and subsequently a graduate student will be involved in the research.