Natural climate variability can obscure or enhance long-term trends in experienced weather due to climate change. This can happen temporarily on timescales of a season to several years to a decade or two. Natural variability is poorly described and attributed to specific causes, contributing to uncertainty and misunderstandings about the nature of climate change that stakeholders and resource managers attempt to anticipate. There exists, therefore, a need to clarify the magnitude and causality of natural climate variability. This connection needs to be explained for locally-experienced weather and particularly for daily extreme events, whose seasonal behavior impacts both resources and imagination. Conversely, it is also important to assess the impact of long-term climate change on natural variability affecting the Southwest. The research team will focus on such assessments and clarify impacts of natural climate variability on the frequencies and intensities of specific extreme temperature and precipitation events as well as their cascading influences on streamflow in the changing climate of the Southwest. Results are meant to clarify the roles of natural influences on varying magnitude and rate of climate change over space and time, thus increasing stakeholders’ awareness of certainty versus uncertainty about the future and facilitating better informed decisions on various timescales.
