Snowpack Reconstructions Incorporating Climate In the Upper Green River Basin (Wyoming)

Anderson, SallyRose; Moser, C.; Tootle, Glenn A.; Grissino-Mayer, Henri D.; Timilsena, Janak; Piechota, Thomas C.

doi:10.3959/2011-8.1

Cited by 15 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…4 shows that the skill improvement is due to the signal in the SSTs and not due to the addition of parameters. This is consistent with other studies that have used SSTs to improve reconstructions in snow water equivalent 15 , 16 and wildfires 17 , in demonstrating the utility of SST in reconstruction. This hybrid approach of using SSTs could potentially improve upon other reconstruction efforts such as precipitation 31 , extreme precipitation 32 and drought indices 33 – 35 .…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Role of Pacific SSTs in improving reconstructed streamflow over the coterminous US

Mukhopadhyay

Patskoski

Sankarasubramanian

2018

Sci Rep

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Reconstructed annual streamflows using tree-ring chronologies provide useful information on moisture availability during the pre-historic period, but they have limitations in estimating high flows due to the upper bound on soil water holding capacity and trees’ metabolic growth limits. We propose a hybrid approach that uses tree-ring chronologies and climatic indices for improving high flows in 301 basins whose annual streamflows are modulated by ENSO and/or PDO. The hybrid decomposition approach relies on separating the moisture supply into the basin as outside-the-region moisture and within-the-region moisture with the former being estimated by SST indices and the latter being estimated by tree-ring chronologies. Analyses over the 301 stations from coterminous US show that the proposed approach improves the high flows and improves the overall error in the reconstructed streamflows. Potential utility of the improved reconstructed annual streamflows with improved high flows is also discussed.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Role of Pacific SSTs in improving reconstructed streamflow over the coterminous US

Mukhopadhyay

Patskoski

Sankarasubramanian

2018

Sci Rep

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“…The paucity of high‐quality tree‐ring data from inaccessible regions and also the short snowfall records in the western Himalaya have been largely responsible for the lack of any such attempt to reconstruct snowfall anomalies. The tree‐ring‐based snowfall reconstructions from elsewhere in the world are also few largely due to the paucity of long‐term snowfall records [ Woodhouse , ; Timilsena and Piechota , ; Masiokas et al ., ; Anderson et al ., ]. The present study is the first attempt in this direction to develop winter snow water equivalent (SWE) using the tree‐ring chronology network of Himalayan cedar ( Cedrus deodara (Roxb.)…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tree‐ring‐based snowfall record for cold arid western Himalaya, India since A.D. 1460

Yadav¹,

Bhutiyani

2013

JGR Atmospheres

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Understanding snowfall variations in high‐elevation cold arid regions of the western Himalaya is important as snowmelt water is the main source of water to meet the scores of socioeconomic needs. The ground‐based observational data, though limited to the last two decades, show decreasing snowfall, raising the concern of looming water scarcity in the region. The tree‐ring data of Himalayan cedar from a network of six moisture‐stressed sites, where snowmelt water is the sole source of soil moisture for tree growth, were used to develop the November–April snow water equivalent (SWE) extending back to A.D. 1460. The reconstruction revealed persistent severe droughts in the 1780s followed by the 1480s and relatively lesser magnitude droughts in the 1540s–1560s, 1740s, and early twentieth century. The pluvial conditions observed in 1948–1958 and 1986–1996 stand out over any other period of such duration. The SWE reconstruction revealed large‐scale spatial coherence with the corresponding month's Palmer Drought Severity Index over the western Himalayan region. Significant relationship observed between SWE reconstruction and January–March Chenab River flow revealed its potential utility in understanding water resource availability in the long‐term perspective.

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“…However, the reconstructed streamflow using tree-ring chronologies underestimates high flow events indicating underestimation of annual streamflow characteristics, which obviously limits their use in the design of water resources systems [Prairie et al, 2008]. This limitation can be partially addressed by including Sea Surface Temperature (SST) data such as El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) or Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) as streamflow reconstruction predictors [Anderson et al, 2012a[Anderson et al, , 2012bPatskoski, 2014].…”

Section: Patskoski and Sankarasubramanian Tree Rings And Reservoir Simentioning

confidence: 99%

Improved reservoir sizing utilizing observed and reconstructed streamflows within a Bayesian combination framework

Patskoski

Sankarasubramanian

2015

Water Resources Research

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Reservoir sizing is a critical task as the storage in a reservoir must be sufficient to supply water during extended droughts. Typically, sequent peak algorithm (SQP) is used with observed streamflow to obtain reservoir storage estimates. To overcome the limited sample length of observed streamflow, synthetic streamflow traces estimated from observed streamflow characteristics are provided with SQP to estimate the distribution of storage. However, the parameters in the stochastic streamflow generation model are derived from the observed record and are still unrepresentative of the long-term drought records. Paleo-streamflow time series, usually reconstructed using tree-ring chronologies, span for a longer period than the observed streamflow and provide additional insight into the preinstrumental drought record. This study investigates the capability of reconstructed streamflow records in reducing the uncertainty in reservoir storage estimation. For this purpose, we propose a Bayesian framework that combines observed and reconstructed streamflow for estimating the parameters of the stochastic streamflow generation model. By utilizing reconstructed streamflow records from two potential stations over the Southeastern U.S., the distribution of storage estimated using the combined streamflows is compared with the distribution of storage estimated using observed streamflow alone based on split-sample validation. Results show that combining observed and reconstructed streamflow yield stochastic streamflow generation parameters more representative of the longer streamflow record resulting in improved reservoir storage estimates. We also generalize the findings through a synthetic experiment by generating reconstructed streamflow records of different sample length and skill. The analysis shows that uncertainty in storage estimates reduces by incorporating reconstruction records with higher skill and longer sample lengths. Potential applications of the proposed methodology are also discussed.

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Snowpack Reconstructions Incorporating Climate In the Upper Green River Basin (Wyoming)

Cited by 15 publications

References 18 publications

Role of Pacific SSTs in improving reconstructed streamflow over the coterminous US

Role of Pacific SSTs in improving reconstructed streamflow over the coterminous US

Tree‐ring‐based snowfall record for cold arid western Himalaya, India since A.D. 1460

Improved reservoir sizing utilizing observed and reconstructed streamflows within a Bayesian combination framework

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