2015
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NOAA announces another round of funding for Western Water Assessment
SpotlightNOAA 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.
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Ursula Rick joins WWA as new program manager
SpotlightWe’re pleased to announce that Ursula Rick has joined WWA as our program manager starting September 1st. Ursula has spent her career at the intersection of science and policy, working to translate each for the effective use by practitioners of the other. She was an AGI/AAAS Congressional Science Fellow in the office of Senator Mark Udall, advising on energy and natural resource policy. Ursula has a PhD in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from CU Boulder, focusing on the hydrology of meltwater in large ice sheets.
Eric Gordon, the WWA program manager since 2010, has returned to school full-time to complete an MS in Biology (with WWA team member Carol Wessman), with the goal of becoming a secondary school science teacher. Eric has been central to WWA’s successes over the past five years, and he has consistently demonstrated his professionalism and dedication in support of the RISA mission. We can’t thank him enough and we wish him the best with his new direction.