Projects

The Challenges to Building Resilient Water Systems Webinar Series will run monthly from September 2024 through February 2025 and cover topics such as new climate monitoring and prediction tools, temperature and precipitation extremes and post-2026 Colorado River Basin water policy. In winter 2025, WWA will convene an in-person symposium on the Front Range of Colorado and Utah’s Wasatch Front to connect water managers with researchers to share recent research and climate resilience efforts

In Spring 2024, Western Water Assessment launched a new project focusing on understanding climate risks and building climate resilience within mobile home park communities. Mobile home park residents face unique and disproportionate exposure to climate related hazards, including heat, fires, and floods. Further, mobile home residents often are left out of many climate and disaster related assistance programs, due to the unique housing structure of mobile home parks. Addressing the needs of mobile home park communities is key to building climate resilience and addressing climate justice needs.

[Project 6]
Water system managers in the Intermountain West face enormous challenges navigating unpredictable streamflow forecasts, changing snowpack behavior, and the increasingly dangerous threat of wildfire to both water quality and quantity. In this project, we aim to engage directly with water system managers in an iterative project to (1) increase understanding of their perceptions of water system resilience, (2) identify key components of regional water system resilience across a range of scales from small rural systems to larger urban systems, and (3) convene cross-scale water manager conversations to support peer learning and identify opportunities to collaboratively build equitable and just regional water system resilience. This project stems directly from conversations with the US Forest Service, Northern Water, and Denver Water.

[Project 3]
In this project, we will engage with water providers, tribal representatives, agricultural and other water users, ecological interests, and recreational groups about future snowpack and streamflow conditions, increasing understanding of how they view water system resilience to compound hazards. This continued engagement is essential both to disseminate new research findings and to understand evolving information and planning landscapes.

Wyoming communities face increasing climate-related risks including wildfire, drought, flooding, and heat waves. This funding competition provided a rare and important opportunity to directly support adaptation and build climate resilience in underserved communities in the state. Applicants provided brief, five-page descriptions of their projects. Proposals were ranked based on their demonstrated community interest, resources and networks in place to support the project, realistic budget and timeline, appropriate and sufficient partners, strong connection to their communities, clarity about how resilience or adaptation would be built through the project, their plan for communicating with WWA and leveraging of WWA resources, their plan for and potential impact of external outreach, and the quality, novelty, and innovation of their ideas. We particularly encouraged proposals from entities and communities who have been historically underserved including Indigenous and small rural communities.

The National Climate Assessment (NCA) is a congressionally mandated quadrennial report prepared and submitted by the US Global Change Research Program. The fifth iteration of this report (NCA5), published in November 2023, provides the scientific foundation to support informed decision-making across the United States.

WWA’s Liz Payton is the lead author of the water chapter. She built and led a team of 11 experts from across the country who work in academia, local utilities, state and federal agencies, and private consulting. They brought expertise in hydrology, climate science, groundwater, drought, extreme precipitation and flooding, Tribal water topics, environmental justice, water quality, snow, and water resources tools and data. The chapter analyzes current climate trends and projects future trends based on a comprehensive review and assessment of peer-reviewed literature and climate and infrastructure data.

The Intermountain West Climate Dashboard, which debuted in October 2012, is our most popular resource that provides information and graphics about current and forecasted regional weather, climate, and water information. Feedback from WWA stakeholders through multiple program evaluations and analyses of website traffic indicate that the dashboard is a very useful ‘one-stop shop’ for up-to-date climate and water information for WWA’s three-state region.

High-impact events cause the majority of societal costs related to weather and climate. They provoke societal responses that can either enhance or detract from long-term adaptation to climate risk. In 2015, WWA began a new research focus on extremes that is designed to place high-impact events in the context of historical climate variability and projected climate change, assess how the risk of these events varies over time and space, and examine how high-impact events interact with place-based vulnerability.

The snowtography handbook guides readers through the process of establishing their own snowtography and soil moisture monitoring stations. It offers guidance on site selection, snowtography options, equipment requirements, and installation. The instructions are based on snow-forest research and hands-on experience at multiple sites in Arizona, and in the San Juan National Forest in southwestern Colorado.

ACCESS is a collaborative project among researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Colorado Boulder funded by the National Science Foundation.
Led by Drs. Yadu Pokhrel and Lifeng Luo at MSU and Dr. Ben Livneh and Liz Payton at CU, the project engages with stakeholders throughout the Southwest US to assess whether current management practices can meet future water demands while maintaining environmental water requirements, and if not, whether there are alternative approaches to achieving water and environmental sustainability. The project uses a comprehensive modeling framework that integrates key drivers of hydrologic change and water management while also accounting for environmental water needs.

[Project 10]
Gateway and natural amenity region (GNAR) communities are those located outside of significant natural amenities, like national parks, public lands, ski areas, and scenic rivers. These communities are heavily dependent on nearby natural amenities for their economic well-being; as a result, they may be particularly hard hit by climate change. In this project, we will leverage the infrastructure and relationships developed by WWA Investigator Danya Rumore’s GNAR Initiative to identify underserved, rural community concerns related to natural hazards and collaboratively develop tools and resources to increase their socio-economic and environmental resilience.

[Project 9]
When communities experience the impacts of compound hazards, responses are often reactive and it is often too late to respond in an efficient and effective manner. Just as academic disciplines are often siloed, sectors and decision-makers can be siloed from one another and not understand interconnections or linkages in decision-making. Social network analysis has been used to understand how information and resources flow through a system and how they influence adaptation actions. While social networks have been looked at retrospectively, they have rarely been assessed in a co-produced approach with stakeholders to proactively assess and shift networks to build system resilience.

[Project 8]
Planners, public land managers, and community decision-makers anecdotally understand and experience the importance of sense of place but may not understand how it can be leveraged to build adaptive capacity to help communities respond to and navigate change. In this project we will collect and compare data across the Intermountain West to better understand how sense of place might be leveraged to assist in adaptation efforts.

[Project 7]
Carbon-dependent communities are facing increasing economic pressures as fossil fuel industries decline, creating a major societal stressor in these communities. At the same time, they also face worsening climate impacts and other hazards, which can cause increasing vulnerabilities concurrent with decreasing adaptive capacity. This project focuses on small rural communities and tribes in Wyoming, addresses our understanding of adaptation needs in carbon-dependent communities, and explores opportunities for building resilience to compound hazards in our region. This project prioritizes the needs and perspectives of rural and tribal communities to support long-term resilience and build networks for future engagement and planning.

[Project 5]
Wildfires create hazards for lives and property through combustion and high temperatures, as well as their impacts to catchment source water. This project focuses on these water-related vulnerabilities, which include far-reaching effects on flood risks, on aquatic habitats, and on water treatment costs.

[Project 4]
Wildfire is a critical vulnerability for water systems in the Intermountain West, particularly those with intakes located in or downstream of forested areas. This project seeks to increase our understanding of the status of water system resilience in the context of changing wildfire risk. It will make key advances by explicitly quantifying the role of fine-scale, spatially distributed snowpack in wildfire risk/resilience under a range of historical precipitation/temperature conditions, as a way to anticipate future wildfire risks under climate change scenarios. The critical advances in scale will support the use of finer land surface/ecological classifications in wildfire risk assessments of future climate projections.

[Project 2]
This project aims to build water system resilience by increasing understanding of the impacts of persistent low streamflows on water systems that rely on surface water sources.

[Project 1]
This project supports water system resilience through use-inspired research that helps providers prepare for vulnerabilities due to seasonal water supply prediction errors. We will make meaningful advances in the understanding of existing water supply forecast vulnerabilities and identifying realistic potential adaptations for water systems.

Analysis of downscaled climate projections for the San Juan Mountains to understand their accuracy at simulating temperature and precipitation patterns in the region

Working with utilities to understand future streamflow prediction

Identifying ‘hotspots’ of increasing drought risk under climate change

Cross-RISA collaborative modeling and stakeholder engagement to support inland flood planning

Developing indicators of vulnerability to identify regional ‘hotspots’

Development of simulation models and decision tools for drought adaptation

Using remotely sensed snowpack data to reduce negative impacts in water management

Colorado River Basin Climate and Hydrology: State of the Science aims to create a shared understanding of the physical setting and the latest data, tools, and research underpinning the management of Colorado River water resources. In identifying both challenges and opportunities, the report will guide water resource managers and researchers in efforts to improve the short-term and mid-term forecasts and long-term projections for the basin's water system.

Originally developed by the Carolinas Integrated Sciences and Assessments (CISA) program and the Social Environmental Research Institute (SERI), VCAPS helps communities become more resilient to weather and climate change.

Exploring the utility of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) for improving the ability of water utilities to identify viable adaptation strategies under climate extremes

Understanding who and how populations are impacted by drought

Evaluating sustained assessment activities in the Southwest US

Identifying opportunities to improve drought risk management by characterizing decision processes and assessing the robustness of snowpack drought indicators.

Developing a database and visualizations of extreme events to assist hazard planners and emergency managers.

Using downscaled projections of future potential evapotranspiration to predict future water demand

Toward closing the gap between climate service providers and users

Assessing the state of the science and practice in extreme precipitation estimation under climate change

Drought contingency plan development for Weber Basin Water Conservancy District

Development of an online, searchable database to provide stakeholders with resources regarding socioeconomic impacts of climate change in the Western Water Assessment region

Developing a pilot effort to reconstruct natural flows in order to understand ecological responses to alterations of natural flow patterns

Providing climate science support for the DOI North Central Climate Science Center, particularly for water cycle issues

Providing support for tribal drought planning efforts on the Wind River Reservation

Systematic examination of stakeholder needs for climate information through previous documentation, in order to avoid replicating previous efforts and exacerbating stakeholder fatigue

Comprehensive synthesis of observed and projected climate co-produced directly with the Colorado Water Conservation Board

A collaborative effort among WWA hydrologists, ecologists, weather and climate experts, and operational forecasters at the NOAA Colorado Basin River Forecast Center in an effort to use a suite of modeling and observation techniques to better understand drivers of snow accumulation and melt in the Upper Colorado River Basin with the ultimate goal of improving CBRFC forecasts

Assessment of the preliminary results of WWA’s effort to expand its presence in Utah

Evaluation of utility of NIDIS’s first drought early warning system (DEWS) to provide lessons for other regional DEWS efforts

Multi-year effort to systematically investigate how and why local decision makers in cities and large towns in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming prepare for and respond to weather and climate-related risk and hazards, such as blizzards, tornadoes, and floods

Using hydrologic modeling to examine the influence of dust deposition and climate change on snowmelt, runoff timing, and volume in the Colorado River Basin

Development of models and other tools capable of understanding how decision deal with hydro-climatic uncertainty in climate adaptation, including response to droughts

Overview of key climate-related vulnerabilities facing several sectors in the State of Colorado.

Working with the Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities (SLCDPU) to help them assess the challenges that climate change presents to their water supply system

Project funded by intra-RISA competition to pilot new efforts to integrate climate science into conservation adaptation efforts developed by The Nature Conservancy in the Southwest

Understanding the impacts of electricity generation on freshwater resources in a warming world

Building on previous efforts to understand the natural long-term variability of the Colorado River basin by generating paleohydrologic reconstructions of annual flows between Lees Ferry and Imperial Dam and the Gila River at its mouth

Building on previous efforts to understand the natural long-term variability of the Colorado River basin by generating paleohydrologic reconstructions of annual flows between Lees Ferry and Imperial Dam and the Gila River at its mouth

Survey of public land managers in the Intermountain West to gauge their awareness of climate variability and change, and their willingness to incorporate climate information into planning

Building new stakeholder relationships with native communities and understanding tribes’ needs for relevant climate information and assistance to prepare for climate change

Publication of a book providing an overview of the nexus among water, energy, and climate issues in the western United States

Demonstrating the River Forecast Center (RFC) Water Resources Outlook tool at user workshops to help identify differences in the user populations and determine changes in the Water Resources Outlook product that might be necessary for different types of users

Case-based analysis of regional integration among M&I water providers in the West as a means of improving resiliency in the face of climate change

Continuing effort by WWA researchers located at the Utah Climate Center to pilot small-scale climate services relevant to various stakeholders in Utah

Communicating lessons learned applicable to the Colorado River Basin from an investigation of water management in South Australia

Analyzing and reporting on collaborations among three regional climate service entities to provide lessons learned

Identification and measurement of the effects of drought adaptations among agriculturalists in the “Three Corners” region of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah via detailed surveys of their decision-making

Conducting a pilot climate vulnerability assessment for the Shoshone National Forest as part of a broader effort by the US Forest Service to develop a climate adaptation toolkit

Development of policy-oriented climate change adaptation plan for Boulder County and the City of Boulder, Colorado

Initial assessment of Missouri Basin stakeholder needs for information on impacts of climate variability and change

Effort to understand the flow of forecast information to stakeholders of the NOAA Colorado Basin River Forecast Center

Exploring climate change impacts on water supplies from the Weber River Basin

Analysis of streamflow variability at short (interannual) and long (interdecadal) time scales to support Bureau of Reclamation management activities on the Colorado River

Providing legally relevant guidance on how public land management agencies can address climate change in decision documents

Synthesis of lessons learned about interstate water marketing in the American West

Development of a modeling framework to predict changes in water quality in response to climate variation or changes in water management

Preliminary assessment of climate impacts and adaptations relevant to state agencies in Colorado; development of an online adaptation database

Providing climate science support and guidance for a multi-stakeholder effort to assess climate change vulnerability in the Gunnison River Basin

Development of a model, with managers at the BLM/USFS San Juan Public Lands Center, to understand the vulnerability of public lands to drought based on ecological and physical factors