INFEWS/T2: The sustainability-productivity tradeoff: Water supply vulnerabilities and adaptation opportunities in California?s coupled agricultural and energy sectors

INFEWS/T2：可持续性与生产力的权衡：加州农业和能源部门的供水脆弱性和适应机会

• 批准号: 1639268
• 负责人: Gregory Characklis
• 金额: $ 295.8万
• 依托单位: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-10-01 至 2021-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1639268&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: INFEWS; T2; sustainability; productivity; tradeoff

The interdependence of water availability, agricultural production, and electric power generation is well established, yet significant challenges remain for understanding how decisions or resource disruptions in any one of these sectors impact the system as a whole. Nowhere is this challenge more pressing than California, which, despite chronic water scarcity, continues to lead the nation in agricultural production by a factor of two. In California, nonstationary climate is expected to increase the frequency and severity of drought, with highly uncertain impacts on the availability of surface water. The subsequent effects on statewide electricity generation and agriculture in California's Central Valley will be closely linked. Surface water availability in the Valley is largely driven by snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada, which is stored and distributed to irrigation districts for food production. During drought, however, irrigators must pump groundwater to compensate for scarce surface water. As a result, electricity demand from groundwater pumping rises by up to 33%, primarily during summer months when urban electricity demands also peak. Reduced runoff during drought also translates to less hydro-power generation (which accounts for ~20% of California's capacity), forcing electric utilities to rely on more expensive natural gas generation. The combination of higher electricity demand and increased reliance on natural gas leads to higher electricity prices. Thus water scarcity drives irrigators to pump significantly more groundwater when electricity prices are highest, an activity that becomes still more expensive if groundwater levels continue their historical decline. These issues illustrate the coupled challenges facing California's food-energy-water (FEW) systems, encompassing multiple scales of governance, from statewide planning and management of infrastructure to local irrigation district and farm-level decisions.The overarching contribution of this research is the design and integration of an open source modeling- simulation framework for the California FEW systems (CalFEW), with interactive visualization, sensitivity analysis, and multi-objective optimization tools to discover key vulnerabilities and tradeoffs across sectors. This new decision support framework will achieve four major scientific objectives. First, it will determine the impacts of climate change-induced variability on the amount, timing, and location of precipitation and runoff in the Sierra Nevada range. Second, this knowledge will be integrated into CalFEW to improve understanding of how the coupled systems will respond to future shocks in the form of water scarcity, commodity price dynamics and regulatory change. Third, it will leverage CalFEW to develop a suite of novel tools for reducing supply/financial risk and incentivizing more sustainable water-electricity consumption in the agriculture sector. Finally, the project will design and test portfolios of risk management tools to balance near-term productivity and long-term robustness/resilience across sectors and spatial scales. All tasks will rely on collaboration with a diverse group of decision-makers to understand how their perspectives on future risks, candidate policy actions, and preferred measures of system performance will affect the adoption of new, more coordinated management approaches.

水资源供应、农业生产和发电之间的相互依赖关系已经得到了很好的确立，但要理解这些部门中任何一个部门的决策或资源中断如何影响整个系统，仍然存在重大挑战。没有什么地方比加州面临的挑战更紧迫了，尽管长期缺水，但该州的农业产量仍以两倍的优势领先全国。在加州，非平稳气候预计将增加干旱的频率和严重程度，对地表水的可用性产生高度不确定的影响。随后对全州发电和加州中央谷农业的影响将紧密相连。山谷中的地表水供应主要是由内华达州的融雪驱动的，这些融雪被储存并分配到灌溉区用于粮食生产。 然而，在干旱期间，灌溉者必须抽取地下水来补充稀缺的地表水。因此，地下水抽水的电力需求增加了33%，主要是在夏季，城市电力需求也达到高峰。干旱期间径流量的减少也意味着水力发电量的减少（约占加州发电量的20%），迫使电力公司依赖更昂贵的天然气发电。更高的电力需求和对天然气的依赖增加导致电价上涨。因此，水资源短缺迫使灌溉者在电价最高时抽取更多的地下水，如果地下水水位继续历史下降，这种活动将变得更加昂贵。这些问题说明了加州的粮食-能源-水（FEW）系统面临的双重挑战，包括多个规模的治理，从全州范围的规划和基础设施管理到当地灌溉区和农场层面的决策。本研究的首要贡献是设计和集成一个开源的建模-模拟框架，用于加州FEW系统（CalFEW），具有交互式可视化，敏感性分析和多目标优化工具，以发现各部门的关键弱点和权衡。这个新的决策支持框架将实现四个主要科学目标。首先，它将确定气候变化引起的变异对内华达州山脉降水和径流量、时间和位置的影响。第二，这方面的知识将被纳入CalFEW，以更好地了解耦合系统将如何应对未来的冲击，形式包括水资源短缺，商品价格动态和监管变化。第三，它将利用CalFEW开发一套新工具，以降低供应/金融风险，并激励农业部门更可持续的水电消费。 最后，该项目将设计和测试风险管理工具组合，以平衡各部门和空间尺度的近期生产力和长期稳健性/复原力。所有任务都将依赖于与不同决策者群体的合作，以了解他们对未来风险、候选政策行动和系统性能首选指标的看法将如何影响新的、更协调的管理方法的采用。

项目成果

Compound hydrometeorological extremes across multiple timescales drive volatility in California electricity market prices and emissions

多个时间尺度的复合水文极端事件导致加州电力市场价格和排放量波动

• DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.115541
• 发表时间: 2020
• 期刊: Applied Energy
• 影响因子: 11.2
• 作者: Su, Yufei;Kern, Jordan D.;Reed, Patrick M.;Characklis, Gregory W.
• 通讯作者: Characklis, Gregory W.

Bias Correction of Hydrologic Projections Strongly Impacts Inferred Climate Vulnerabilities in Institutionally Complex Water Systems

• DOI: 10.1061/(asce)wr.1943-5452.0001493
• 发表时间: 2022-01
• 期刊: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
• 影响因子: 3.1
• 作者: K. Malek;Patricia Reed;H. Zeff;A. Hamilton;M. Wrzesien;N. Holtzman;S. Steinschneider;J. Herman;T. Pavelsky

Tailoring WRF and Noah‐MP to Improve Process Representation of Sierra Nevada Runoff: Diagnostic Evaluation and Applications

定制 WRF 和 Noah™MP 以改进内华达山脉径流的过程表示：诊断评估和应用

• DOI: 10.1029/2019ms001832
• 发表时间: 2020
• 期刊: Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
• 影响因子: 6.8
• 作者: Holtzman, Nataniel M.;Pavelsky, Tamlin M.;Cohen, Jonathan S.;Wrzesien, Melissa L.;Herman, Jonathan D.
• 通讯作者: Herman, Jonathan D.

Technology Pathways Could Help Drive the U.S. West Coast Grid's Exposure to Hydrometeorological Uncertainty

技术途径可能有助于推动美国西海岸电网面临水文气象不确定性

• DOI: 10.1029/2021ef002187
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Earth's Future
• 作者: Wessel, Jacob;Kern, Jordan D.;Voisin, Nathalie;Oikonomou, Konstantinos;Haas, Jannik
• 通讯作者: Haas, Jannik

Watershed‐Scale Effective Hydraulic Properties of the Continental United States

• DOI: 10.1029/2020ms002440
• 发表时间: 2021-06
• 期刊: Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
• 影响因子: 6.8
• 作者: A. Tashie;T. Pavelsky;L. Band;S. Topp