The purpose of this project is to use existing climate change datasets from the Climate Impacts Group (CIG) to summarize the the projected climate change impacts to United States Forest Service (USFS) lands in Oregon and Washington (Figure 1). Stakeholders in the Forest Service of this region were particularly interested in the variables that are likely to impact freshwater aquatic species, including projected changes in water availability, snowpack, and flood and low flow severities.
Our objective is to summarize climate and hydrologic projections for USFS lands in Oregon and Washington. Since individual national forests may contain numerous distinct ecological regimes and cross hydrologic boundaries, averaging over these has the potential to obscure important climatic changes and confound planning efforts. In order to avoid this pitfall, we chose to provide summaries that follow ecological and hydrologic boundaries, rather than administrative borders.
These summmaries are produced using results from the CIG Columbia Basin Climate Change Scenarios Project (CBCCSP, Hamlet et al., 2010). The CBCCSP dataset consists of an in-depth suite of high-resolution climate projections for the Columbia river basin and coastal drainages in Oregon and Washington. Specifically, the CBCCSP dataset includes a gridded 1/16th degree (~6 km) observationally-based historical (1915-2006) climate dataset (daily maximum temperature, minimum temperature, and precipitation). These are combined with climate projections using results from 10 Global Climate Model (GCM) simulations of 21st century climate (following the A1b and B1 scenarios), downscaled to 1/16th degree using the Composite Delta, Hybrid Delta, and Bias Correction and Statistical Downscaling (BCSD) methods of downscaling (Hamlet et al., 2010). These climate datasets are used to produce hydrologic products (e.g., runoff, evapotranspiration, soil moisture) for the historical and future climate projections using the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC, Liang et al., 1994) macroscale hydrologic model.
To produce the present dataset, the CBCCSP results were summarized at monthly time scales over both Bailey ecosections and Omernik level III ecoregions as well as the 8-digit and 10-digit Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC4/HUC5) basins (shown in Figure 1). The latter were used primarily to assess changes in runoff statistics and the snow season. Summaries are included for the variables listed in Table 1. Projected changes are summarized in tables, plots showing changes in the annual cycle, and maps showing the geographic pattern of changes. These results, as well as the methods used to produce the dataset, are all summarized in the project report.
Finally, we note another relevant CIG dataset (project website; Littell et al., 2010), which provides a simplified set of ecosystem-based summaries over a much wider domain. Covering nearly all of major basins in the Western U.S., this dataset is mentioned because it could be used to extend the present assessment to USFS lands in other regions.