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Over the past four decades, annual area burned has increased significantly in California and across the western USA. This trend reflects a confluence of intersecting factors that affect wildfire regimes. It is correlated with increasing temperatures and atmospheric vapour pressure deficit. Anthropogenic climate change is the driver behind much of this change, in addition to influencing other climate-related factors, such as compression of the winter wet season. These climatic trends and associated increases in fire activity are projected to continue into the future. Additionally, factors related to the suppression of the Indigenous use of fire, aggressive fire suppression and, in some cases, changes in logging practices...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The Conserving Climate Change Refugia for the Mojave Ecosystem workshop was held virtually via zoom on Wednesday, December 9, 2019, using funding from the Southwest Climate and the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Centers (SW and NE CASCs). The objectives of this workshop were to bring together natural resource managers and researchers to 1) learn about current work in the Mojave ecoregion related to climate adaptation, 2) prioritize focal species/ecosystems for climate change refugia conservation/funding, and 3) identify research gaps, all in service of operationalizing climate change adaptation strategies in the Mojave ecoregion. The meeting began with presentations by researchers and resource managers who...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Fire has always been a part of life in southern California. Climate change and current fire management practices have led to catastrophic losses and impacts to human health, infrastructure and ecosystems, as seen, for example, in the 2018 Montecito debris flow. Indigenous wisdom instructs that rather than suppressing fire, we should seek to be in good relationship with fire. This project centers the voices of Chumash people by revitalizing their good relationship with fire in Chumash homelands. This revitalization comes at a critical time for both fire management and revitalization of Indigenous cultural burning practices in the southwest. The project will enable the recovery and documenting of Chumash knowledge...
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Natural resource managers and researchers often need long-term averages of historical and future climate scenarios for their study area yet may not have the resources to make these summaries. This project will provide high quality, detailed maps of historical and projected future climate and hydrologic conditions for California and a finer scale version for southern California. The project will also assess the feasibility of expanding these reference data to the southwestern US and identify the most suitable online data portals for the public to view and analyze the data in support of local initiatives. The map products can be used to assess the impacts of ongoing climate change and to develop climate adaptation...
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The 2017 fire season in California was highly unusual with its late seasonal timing, the areal extent it burned, and its devastation to communities. These fires were associated with extreme winds and were potentially also influenced by unusually dry conditions during several years leading up to the 2017 events. This fire season brought additional attention and emphasized the vital need for managers in the western U.S. to have access to scientific information on when and where to expect dangerous fire events. Understanding the multiple factors that cause extreme wildfire events is critical to short and long-term forecasting and planning. Seasonal climate measures such as temperature and precipitation are commonly...
Abstract (from AGU 100): This study investigates snowmelt and streamflow responses to cloudiness variability across the mountainous parts of the western United States. Twenty years (1996–2015) of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite‐derived cloud cover indices (CC) with 4‐km spatial and daily temporal resolutions are used as a proxy for cloudiness. The primary driver of nonseasonal fluctuations in daily mean solar insolation is the fluctuating cloudiness. We find that CC fluctuations are related to snowmelt and snow‐fed streamflow fluctuations, to some extent (correlations of <0.5). Multivariate linear regression models of daily snowmelt (MELT) and streamflow (ΔQ) variations are constructed for each...
Natural climate variability can strongly temporarily enhance or obscure long-term trends in regional weather due to global climate change. We planned to explore (from our original proposal): (1) The influence of low frequency climate variability (interannual and decadal) on the seasonal probability distributions of daily weather (temperature and precipitation) within the Southwest, with a view on how natural variability modulates regional trends due to global warming. We explored natural climate variability and its impacts on extreme temperatures in Guirguis et al. (2015). We also explored natural climate variability and its impacts on precipitation extremes in Cavanaugh et al. (2015), Cavanugh and Gershunov (2015)...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Abstract Coastal marsh within Mediterranean climate zones is exposed to episodic watershed runoff and sediment loads that occur during storm events. Simulating future marsh accretion under sea level rise calls for attention to: (a) physical processes acting over the time scale of storm events and (b) biophysical processes acting over time scales longer than storm events. Using the upper Newport Bay in Southern California as a case study, we examine the influence of event-scale processes on simulated change in marsh topography by comparing: (a) a biophysical model that integrates with an annual time step and neglects event-scale processes (BP-Annual), (b) a physical model that resolves event-scale processes but...
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This data release contains monthly 270-meter resolution Basin Characterization Model (BCMv8) climate and hydrologic variables for Localized Constructed Analog (LOCA; Pierce et al., 2014)-downscaled Global Climate Models (GCMs) for Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 (medium-low emissions) and 8.5 (high emissions) for hydrologic California. The 20 future climate scenarios consist of ten GCMs with RCP 4.5 and 8.5 each: ACCESS 1.0, CanESM2, CCSM4, CESM1-BGC, CMCC-CMS, CNRM-CM5, GFDL-CM3, HadGEM2-CC, HadGEM2-ES, and MIROC5. The LOCA climate scenarios span water years 1950 to 2099 with greenhouse-gas forcings beginning in 2006. The LOCA downscaling method has been shown to produce better estimates of extreme...
Abstract (from AMS100): Between water years 2012 and 2017, the Truckee–Carson river system in the western United States experienced both historic-low and record-high Sierra Nevada snowpack, anomalously warm temperatures, and winter and spring flooding. As part of an ongoing collaborative modeling research program in the river system, researchers conduct annual interviews with key local water managers to characterize local climate adaptation strategies and implementation barriers, and identify science information needs to prioritize ongoing research activities. This article presents new findings from a third wave of interviews conducted with the same water managers following the historic 2017 wet year. Comparison...
Incorporating climate change considerations into land management and species conservation remains challenging for natural resource managers, because other stressors such as drought or invasive species currently have a larger impact. Thus, it is often difficult to prioritize long-term goals when resources for the immediate needs of species are already difficult to secure. This project aims to combine the latest decision science with climate change refugia modeling to create a novel decision-framework that emphasizes a collaborative approach to complex management issues, which aims to bridge the gap between managing for current priorities and long-term climate change adaptation. In doing so, this framework will be...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
On November 8, 2019, the first meeting of the Southwest Climate Change Refugia Research Coalition was held in Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, under funding from the Southwest and Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (CASCs). The objective of this workshop was to bring together natural resource managers and researchers to move forward on climate change adaptation and begin to build a climate change refugia conservation strategy for the Sierra Nevada. Goals were to identify opportunities to apply existing data and modeling results to ongoing local conservation efforts in order to optimize limited resources.
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Aim Invasive species prevention and management can be guided by comparisons of invasion risk across space and among species. Species distribution models are widely used to assess invasion risk and typically estimate suitability for species presence. However, suitability for presence may not capture patterns of abundance and impact. We asked how models estimating suitability for presence versus suitability for abundance aligned in their implications for risk assessment. Location Western United States. Methods We developed ensembles of species distribution models for presence and for abundance for four invasive plants. We visualized the distribution of presence and abundance in environmental and geographic space and...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from RMetS): Over the Upper Colorado River basin (UCRB), temperatures in widely used gridded data products do not warm as much as mean temperatures from a stable set of U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations, located at generally lower elevations, in most months of the year. This is contrary to expectations of elevation‐dependent warming, which suggests that warming increases with elevation. These findings could reflect (a) a genuine absence of elevation‐dependent warming in the region, (b) systematic non‐climatic influences on either the USHCN stations or high‐elevation stations, including known inhomogeneities related to changes in the time of observation and instrumentation, or (c) suppression...
Abstract (from AMS): The upper Colorado River basin (UCRB) is one of the primary sources of water for the western United States, and increasing temperatures likely will elevate the risk of reduced water supply in the basin. Although variability in water-year precipitation explains more of the variability in water-year UCRB streamflow than water-year UCRB temperature, since the late 1980s, increases in temperature in the UCRB have caused a substantial reduction in UCRB runoff efficiency (the ratio of streamflow to precipitation). These reductions in flow because of increasing temperatures are the largest documented temperature-related reductions since record keeping began. Increases in UCRB temperature over the past...
(Abstract from AMS Journals): Researchers are producing an ever greater number of web-based climate data and analysis tools in support of natural resource research and management. Yet the apparent absence or underreporting of evaluation in the development of these applications has raised questions as to whether, by whom, and for what they are utilized, and, relatedly, whether they meet the rationale for their development. This paper joins recent efforts to address these questions by introducing one approach to evaluation—developmental evaluation—and reporting on its use in the evaluation of the Southwest Climate and Environmental Information Collaborative (SCENIC). A web interface under development at the Western...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Climate Change threatens efforts to restore and protect the natural and cultural resources vital to the traditional ways of life of Northern California Tribes. The state has indicated the need to include Tribal science priorities and Tribal management objectives into regional planning and policy. Moreover, Governor Newsom’s recent Executive Order N-82-20 aims to combat the biodiversity and climate change crises in California using nature-based solutions. Tribes, however, are at different phases of developing climate adaptation/ resiliency plans and, in many cases, have yet to have the opportunity to align these plans with neighboring Tribes or to include Tribal science in regional and statewide plans. As a result,...
(Abstract from Wiley): The growing season start and duration, along with other temperature-related measures of importance to premium wine grapes in Napa Valley, California have changed as climate over the western United States has warmed. The growing season start has varied from year to year with a standard deviation of about 3 weeks, but over the 1958–2016 record a linear fit to the time sequence shows it advanced by more than 4 weeks. Over the study period, advances in the growing season were strongly influenced by temperature increases beginning in the late 1960s with warm anomalies generally persisting through recent years. The date upon which the growing season accumulated 1400 growing degree-days also shifted...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation


map background search result map search result map Preventing Extreme Fire Events by Learning from History: The Effects of Wind, Temperature, and Drought Extremes on Fire Activity Northern California Tribal Climate Adaptation and Science Integration Research Project Future Climate and Hydrology from Twenty Localized Constructed Analog (LOCA) Scenarios and the Basin Characterization Model (BCMv8) Cycles of Renewal: Returning Good Fire to the Chumash Homelands Multi-Decadal Simulation of Marsh Topography Under Sea Level Rise and Episodic Sediment Loads Rendering High-Resolution Hydro-Climatic Data for Southern California Multi-Decadal Simulation of Marsh Topography Under Sea Level Rise and Episodic Sediment Loads Cycles of Renewal: Returning Good Fire to the Chumash Homelands Northern California Tribal Climate Adaptation and Science Integration Research Project Preventing Extreme Fire Events by Learning from History: The Effects of Wind, Temperature, and Drought Extremes on Fire Activity Future Climate and Hydrology from Twenty Localized Constructed Analog (LOCA) Scenarios and the Basin Characterization Model (BCMv8) Rendering High-Resolution Hydro-Climatic Data for Southern California