NOAA SARP Award: Advancing the use of drought early warning systems in the Upper Colorado River Basin

Ben Livneh and colleagues recently received an award from NOAA’s Sectoral Applications Research Program. This project will identify opportunities to improve drought risk management by characterizing decision processes related to drought risk and describing the current use of information among water providers in the Western Slope. Then, we will assess whether snowpack indicators will remain good predictors of seasonal water supplies under a warming climate. The first element of the project will consist of in-depth interviews, participant observation, document analysis and focus groups of five Western Slope water entities. The second element will evaluate the robustness of current snow-based drought indicators, estimate the change in robustness under projected future climate warming using modeled data, and explore the implications of changing robustness for climate adaptation resilience through focus groups with water managers. The project team consists of researchers and practitioners with diverse and complementary backgrounds (hydrology, climatology, social science, policy, civil engineering, and water resources management) and broad experience working on water and climate issues on the Western Slope. Personnel for this project include: Ben Livneh, Lisa Dilling, Bill Travis, Jeff Lukas, Nolan Doesken, and Eric Kuhn.