Events

Snowpack, Drought, and Water Supply in a Warming Mountain West

Snowpack, Drought, and Water Supply in a Warming Mountain West

Snowpack, Drought, and Water Supply in a Warming Mountain West

Snowpack, Drought, and Water Supply in a Warming Mountain West

Western Water Assessment's Jeff Lukas and Liz Payton discussed an overview of the recently released report, Colorado River Basin Climate and Hydrology: State of the Science, followed by Q&A.

Lisa Dilling gave a public talk on usable science, followed by a panel discussion featuring Jeff Deems, Arnaud Chulliat, and Lise St. Denis whose science has been used beyond the university.

We will welcome two guest speakers, Bill McCormick, Chief of the Colorado Dam Safety Office and Dr. James Prairie, a hydrologist with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation at CADSWES. Each will give a talk on current projects with WWA that illustrate the entrainment of science into management decisions. Mr. McCormick will review the Colorado-New Mexico Regional Extreme Precipitation Study and considerations of PMP (probable maximum precipitation) in a changing climate. Dr.

The Evaporative Demand Drought Index, or EDDI, is a drought index that can serve as an indicator of both rapidly evolving “flash” droughts (developing over a few weeks) and sustained droughts (developing over months but lasting up to years) and that has been shown to provide earlier warning of drought than many established drought indices, such as the US Drought Monitor. EDDI is currently under development at NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory and the Desert Research Institute and is slated for operationalization at the National Water Center by May, 2019.