Tree-ring reconstructions of streamflow
and their use in water management
Cheyenne, WY, September 6, 2007
Workshop
Handout
Workshop
Participant List
This all-day workshop was organized
at the request of Clint Bassett and Randy Hays, Cheyenne Board
of Public Utilities (BOPU). They were interested in both a workshop
similar to the previous ones held by Jeff Lukas and Connie Woodhouse
of WWA, as well as the possibility of streamflow reconstructions
for the three basins they draw water from.
For the morning session of the workshop, there
were six participants from BOPU besides Bassett, five from the
Wyoming Water Development Office (WWDO; a major funder of applied
hydrologic research in Wyoming), and one each from several other
state and local agencies (see participant list). Lukas gave a
90-minute presentation explaining how tree-rings record climate
information, how tree-ring data are collected, processed, and
used to generate streamflow reconstructions, and how water managers
around the West are applying the reconstructions to water management.
Steve Gray, Glenn Tootle, and Anthony Barnett of the University
of Wyoming gave a 40-minute presentation describing the status
of tree-ring work in several Wyoming basins, including new reconstructions
for the upper Green and its tributaries, and the upper North Platte.
The afternoon session of the workshop included
several BOPU staff, one WWDO staff member, Gray, Barnett, and
Lukas. The focus of discussion was how to generate for BOPU tree-ring
hydrologies relevant to their three gages of interest, which are
in the Green, North Platte, and South Platte basins, respectively.
Gray, Barnett, and Lukas will collaborate to gather existing tree-ring
data for these gages over the next several months. The workshop
was capped off by a short field session in the Vedauwoo area west
of Cheyenne, where field techniques for collecting tree-ring data
were demonstrated to the group.
The consensus of participants was that workshop
was successful in conveying how tree-ring data are generated and
used, in presenting the status of tree-ring data relevant to water
management to Wyoming, and in laying the groundwork for the future
use of tree-ring data by Wyoming’s largest urban water provider,
Cheyenne BOPU.
Jeff Lukas,
University of Colorado & WWA
TreeFlow Workshops
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