An integrated multi-directional approach to understanding local hydrologic responses to global climate change

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Dr. Julie Vano has been awarded an NSF Earth Science Postdoctoral Fellowship to develop new approaches to understand future climate impacts on local water resources in the Pacific Northwest. A warmer climate threatens to alter where, when, and how much water is available for ecosystems and human communities. Yet water resource managers, who constantly work to find balance between a diversity of stakeholder needs, are unsure how to incorporate climate change into their planning processes. This research addresses this challenge through developing two new approaches to scenario planning that can be more effectively used by water resource managers and decision-makers. These approaches use global climate model output, hydrological models, and impact assessment tools to construct scenarios of future hydroclimate. The first begins with climate scenarios and hydrologic sensitivities to understand central tendencies and ranges of runoff changes - sensitivities identified through modeled experiments of how changes in temperature and precipitation translate to changes in streamflow magnitude. The second explores runoff extremes by using the same modeling framework, but works in the reverse direction: first, resource managers identify a metric of concern, e.g. flow above 75 Kcfs at a certain gauge, then hydrologic factors that lead to the metric are diagnosed, and finally connections to climate drivers are quantified. Floods in the Columbia River will be the test case for this impacts-driven approach. This research will be carried out at Oregon State University, where it will leverage established networks between researchers and stakeholders. The project aims to: (1) improve understanding of and the connections between atmospheric conditions, hydrologic processes, land surface properties, and local hydrologic impacts, (2) develop new approaches to quantify local change through using concepts of hydrologic landscape sensitivities to changes in central tendencies (incremental changes) and extreme events, and (3) build lasting partnerships between science and management that ensures decision-maker participation in the research process, so as to create appropriate tools to better evaluate the sustainability of future water planning options. Throughout this work, there will be a continued effort to insure results are relevant to the larger management community through stakeholder meetings, the experiences of which will be used to create a short-course on stakeholder interactions for students at Oregon State University and the larger science community.