NOAA announces another round of funding for Western Water Assessment

NOAA announced they will support Western Water Assessment (WWA) for another five years. The Climate Program Office recently funded 53 new projects aimed at improving climate research and the ability of communities to respond. Included in the list was WWA, which received $4 million over the next five years. Under this new round of funding, we plan to pursue three main research themes. One of those is to examine how the science developed by WWA and other research entities can be made more useful to decision-making. Another research theme over the next five years will be vulnerability and adaptation. We plan to focus on how Utah, Colorado and Wyoming are vulnerable to climate change, as well as how to design more adaptive and resilient systems, looking specifically at water supply. And, finally, in an extension of our work on the 2013 Front Range floods, we want to better understand extreme weather and climate events and help to use that understanding to inform future decisions.