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Folders: ROOT > ScienceBase Catalog > USGS National Research Program > USGS National Research Program Projects > Predict the Variability and Recent Changes in the Hydrologic Cycle to Natural and Human-Induced Climatic Influences ( Show all descendants )

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A 21-yr gridded monthly fire-starts and acres-burned dataset from U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs fire reports recreates the seasonality and interannual variability of wildfire in the western United States. Despite pervasive human influence in western fire regimes, it is striking how strongly these data reveal a fire season responding to variations in climate. Correlating anomalous wildfire frequency and extent with the Palmer Drought Severity Index illustrates the importance of prior and accumulated precipitation anomalies for future wildfire season severity. This link to antecedent seasons' moisture conditions varies widely with differences in...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Lundquist, J.D., Dettinger, M., Stewart, I., and Cayan, D., 2008, Variability and trends in spring runoff in the western United States, in Waggoner, F., ed., Climate warming in western North America/Evidence and environmental effects: Utah State University Press, Chapter 5.
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Diurnal cycles of streamflow in snow-fed rivers can be used to infer the average time a water parcel spends in transit from the top of the snowpack to a stream gauge in the river channel. This travel time, which is measured as the difference between the hour of peak snowmelt in the afternoon and the hour of maximum discharge each day, ranges from a few hours to almost a full day later. Travel times increase with longer percolation times through deeper snowpacks, and prior studies of small basins have related the timing of a stream's diurnal peak to the amount of snow stored in a basin. However, in many larger basins the time of peak flow is nearly constant during the first half of the melt season, with little or...
In this paper an isotope-incorporated regional model is developed and utilized for simulations of an atmospheric river event that occurred in March 2005. A set of sensitivity experiments and comparisons with observations confirm that the kinetic isotopic exchange between falling droplets and ambient water vapor below the cloud base was mostly responsible for the initial enrichment and subsequent rapid drop of the deuterium abundance in precipitation observed during the event even under humid conditions. According to the budget analysis the increase in isotopic composition during the latter half of the event was primarily due to horizontal advection. The contribution of condensation from different atmospheric heights...
Background Accumulating evidence shows that the planet is warming as a response to human emissions of greenhouse gases. Strategies of adaptation to climate change will require quantitative projections of how altered regional patterns of temperature, precipitation and sea level could cascade to provoke local impacts such as modified water supplies, increasing risks of coastal flooding, and growing challenges to sustainability of native species. Methodology/Principal Findings We linked a series of models to investigate responses of California's San Francisco Estuary-Watershed (SFEW) system to two contrasting scenarios of climate change. Model outputs for scenarios of fast and moderate warming are presented as 2010–2099...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
The ecosystems of the San Francisco Bay estuary are influenced by the salinity of its waters, which in turn depends on flushing by freshwater inflows from the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Estimates of full-natural flows in eight major rivers that flush the Bay are analyzed here by extended empirical-orthogonal-function analyses to characterize distinct ‘modes’ of seasonal flow and runoff variability. These modes provide a clear identification of the seasons in which the various rivers respond to hydroclimatic forcings and the seasons during which the rivers most strongly affect San Francisco Bay salinities. About 60 percent of the runoff variability is shared by the rivers over the course of a year but season-to-season...
The U.S. Geological Survey Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) model was applied to basins in 14 different hydroclimatic regions to determine the sensitivity and variability of the freshwater resources of the United States in the face of current climate-change projections. Rather than attempting to choose a most likely scenario from the results of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an ensemble of climate simulations from five models under three emissions scenarios each was used to drive the basin models. Climate-change scenarios were generated for PRMS by modifying historical precipitation and temperature inputs; mean monthly climate change was derived by calculating changes in mean climates...
Spring snowmelt is the most important contribution of many rivers in western North America. If climate changes, this contribution may change. A shift in the timing of springtime snowmelt towards earlier in the year already is observed during 1948–2000 in many western rivers. Streamflow timingchanges for the 1995–2099 period are projected using regression relationsbetween observed streamflow-timing responses in each river, measured by the temporal centroid of streamflow (CT) each year, and local temperature (TI) and precipitation (PI) indices. Under 21st century warming trends predicted by the Parallel Climate Model (PCM) under business-as-usual greenhouse-gas emissions, streamflow timing trends across much of western...
Bouse, R.M., Fuller, C.C., Luoma, S.N., Hornberger, M.I., Jaffe, B.E., and Smith, R.E., 2010, Mercury-Contaminated Hydraulic Mining Debris in San Francisco Bay: San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, v. 8, no. 1, 28 p. (on-line article in pdf format, 786 KB, San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science is an open access journal)
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Peterson, D.H., Lundquist, J.D., Stewart, I., Knowles, N., Solomon, M and Hager, S.W., 2005, Sierra Nevada Hydroclimatology: An experimental prediction of maximum daily snowmelt discharge in 2005. (available on-line only, in pdf format).
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
California’s mountainous topography, exposure to occasional heavily moisture-laden storm systems, and varied communities and infrastructures in low lying areas make it highly vulnerable to floods. An important question facing the state—in terms of protecting the public and formulating water management responses to climate change—is “how might future climate changes affect flood characteristics in California?” To help address this, we simulate floods on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the state’s primary catchment, based on downscaled daily precipitation and temperature projections from three General Circulation Models (GCMs). These climate projections are fed into the Variable Infiltration Capacity...
ABSTRACT: Climate variations can play an important, if not always crucial, role in successful conjunctive management of ground water and surface water resources. This will require accurate accounting of the links between variations in climate, recharge, and withdrawal from the resource systems, accurate projection or predictions of the climate variations, and accurate simulation of the responses of the resource systems. To assess linkages and predictability of climate influences on conjunctive management, global climate model (GCM) simulated precipitation rates were used to estimate inflows and outflows from a regional ground water model (RGWM) of the coastal aquifers of the Santa Clara-Calleguas Basin at Ventura,...
A realistic description of how temperatures vary with elevation is crucial for ecosystem studies and for models of basin-scale snowmelt and spring streamflow. This paper explores surface temperature variability using temperature data from an array of 37 sensors, called the Yosemite network, which traverses both slopes of the Sierra Nevada in the vicinity of Yosemite National Park, California. These data indicate that a simple lapse rate is often a poor description of the spatial temperature structure. Rather, the spatial pattern of temperature over the Yosemite network varies considerably with synoptic conditions. Empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) were used to identify the dominant spatial temperature patterns...
Short-term climate and weather systems can have a strong influence on mountain snowmelt, sometimes overwhelming the effects of elevation and aspect. Although most years exhibit a spring onset that starts first at lowest and moves to highest elevations, in spring 2002, flow in a variety of streams within the Tuolumne and Merced River basins of the southern Sierra Nevada all rose synchronously on 29 March. Flow in streams draining small high-altitude glacial subcatchments rose at the same time as that draining much larger basins gauged at lower altitudes, and streams from north- and south-facing cirques rose and fell together. Historical analysis demonstrates that 2002 was one among only 8 yr with such synchronous...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
This study uses the new satellite-based Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC) mission to retrieve tropospheric profiles of temperature and moisture over the data-sparse eastern Pacific Ocean. The COSMIC retrievals, which employ a global positioning system radio occultation technique combined with “first-guess” information from numerical weather prediction model analyses, are evaluated through the diagnosis of an intense atmospheric river (AR; i.e., a narrow plume of strong water vapor flux) that devastated the Pacific Northwest with flooding rains in early November 2006. A detailed analysis of this AR is presented first using conventional datasets and highlights the fact...
Hidalgo, H.G., Dettinger, M.D., and Cayan, D.C., 2008, Changes in Aridity in the Western United States: Californa Drought: An Update -- 2008, California Department of Water Resources, State of California, p. 54-59. (on-line report in pdf format, 4148 KB)
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation