Identify 'Hotspots' of Climate Change Impacts on Water Availability
The potential for large declines in streamflow in the western United States due to climate change presents an existential challenge for water management. The latest projections of climate and hydrology from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) offer a window useful for identifying regions where shifts toward more frequent or more severe drought are likely. However, these raw projections are often at too-coarse a scale for impact assessment and also contain a number of other key uncertainties. The goal of this effort will be to identify hotspots of increased drought risk under climate change and to characterize the uncertainty in those risks.