WSC-Category 1 Collaborative Proposal: Coupled Multi-scale Economic, Hydrologic, and Estuarine Modeling to Assess Impacts of Climate Change on Water Quality Management

1360280Easton1360285Li1360286NajjarWSC-Category 1合作建议：评估气候变化对水质管理的影响的多尺度经济、水文和河口联合建模我们社会面临的最重要的问题之一是气候变化对水质、水资源和生态系统功能的潜在影响。城市扩张和农业集约化等错综复杂的问题使得很难确定气候变化对水质、生态系统功能以及实现水质目标的成本的单一影响。鉴于切萨皮克湾面临的挑战(城市增长、农业集约化、气候变化)，综合多学科方法对于向决策者提供强有力和可靠的信息至关重要。研究小组将使用的方法是在多个尺度上整合关键的气候、水文、河口和经济驱动因素，这将为切萨皮克湾系统提供水资源管理选择。面对这些其他压力来源，评估气候变化影响的一种方法是开发包含对水系统的相关控制的耦合模型。该项目的总体目标是建立一个可量化的预测框架，将陆地养分输出的生物地球化学和水文驱动因素与气候变化联系起来，以评估生态系统管理对河口功能和水质保护成本的影响。为了实现这一目标，该项目建议利用气候变化和气候变化对切萨皮克湾河口水质退化的水文、生物地球化学和经济驱动因素的影响的多尺度模型评估，在切萨皮克湾共同的区域流域地形梯度和主要土地用途(如农业、森林和城市)中广泛开展工作。气候数据将从全球和区域气候模型按比例缩小，并应用于流域模型，以预测在土地管理(例如最佳管理做法)方面进行了重大投资的五个试验台流域的水文活动和养分生产。试验台模型结果将被用来填充经济模型，以量化水质改善及其相关成本之间的最佳权衡。然后，流域模型将被升级，以预测河口模型的水文和营养输送，以确定河口的影响。

1360280Easton1360285Li1360286NajjarWSC-Category 1 Collaborative Proposal: Coupled Multi-scale Economic, Hydrologic, and Estuarine Modeling to Assess Impacts of Climate Change on Water Quality ManagementOne of the most important questions facing our society is the potential impact of climate change on water quality, water resources and ecosystem function. Confounding issues such as urban sprawl and agricultural intensification make it difficult to determine the singular effects of climate change on water quality, ecosystem function and on the costs to achieve water quality goals. In view of the challenges facing the Chesapeake Bay (urban growth, agricultural intensification, climate change) an integrated multi-disciplinary approach is critical to provide policy makers with robust and reliable information. The approach that the research team will use is to integrate key climate, hydrologic, estuarine, and economic drivers at multiple scales which will provide water management options for the Chesapeake Bay system.One way to assess the impacts of climate change in the face of these other stressors is to develop coupled models that incorporate the pertinent controls on the water system. The overarching goal of this project is to develop a quantifiable, predictive framework that couples biogeochemical and hydrologic drivers of terrestrial nutrient export with climate change to evaluate the effects of ecosystem management on estuarine function and costs of water quality protection. To achieve this goal, the project proposes to work broadly across common regional Chesapeake Bay watershed physiographic gradients and dominant land uses (e.g., agriculture, forest and urban) using a multi-scale model evaluation of the impact of climate change and climate variability on the hydrologic, biogeochemical, and economic drivers of water quality degradation in the Chesapeake Bay estuary. Climate data will be down scaled from global and regional climate models and applied to watershed models to predict hydrologic activity and nutrient production across five test-bed watersheds where significant investments in land management (e.g., Best Management Practices) have been made. Test-bed model results will be used to populate an economic model to quantify the optimum tradeoff between water quality improvements and their associated costs. The watershed models will then be upscaled to predict hydrologic and nutrient delivery to an estuarine model to determine estuary impacts.