News and Spotlights

John Berggren received the CIRES Graduate Student Research Award for his project "Transitioning to a New Era in Western United States Water Governance: Examining Adaptive Capacity ... in the Colorado River Basin". This project uses a multi-method case study research design to theoretically and empirically determine criteria for water policy. It focuses on the Colorado River Basin as a case study to better understand how these criteria might be identified, contextualized, and put into operation. Additionally, this research will examine how water managers can use these criteria to help incorporate new scientific information and successfully adapt existing institutions to continually changing environmental conditions.

Western Water Assessment was awarded an Innovative Seed Grant from the Office of the Vice Chancellor to work with the University of Colorado Grand Challenge project, Earth Lab. Earth Lab uses new data harmonization techniques and innovative visualization tools to identify and characterize changes in key processes in the earth system. Drawing on the experience of WWA, we will partner with Earth Lab researchers to pilot research co-production processes and training to fully harness the power of Earth Lab to improve societal decision making. This partnership will bring together some of the most innovative data science with new techniques to connect science with decision makers in private and public sectors and thus create impact beyond the university.

Daily Camera

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.

Eos

Orange County Register

NOAA and NASA announced on January 20 that according to their respective analyses of surface temperature records, 2015 was the warmest calendar year on record (since 1880) globally, by a large margin over 2014. NOAA also reported that for the western US, 2015 was the warmest year on record (since 1895), just topping 1934, and the 3rd-warmest year on record (since 1895) for each of the states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

Medium

KGNU Science Show

As political leaders are still hammering out an accord at the UN Climate Summit (COP21), in Paris, to rein in global warming. KGNU Science Show discussed the underlying scientific facts about climate change, and the policy promises and challenges for our future with WWA's Lisa Dilling. Listen to the show (start time: 7:06).