Water Management Decisions Using Multiple Hydrologic Models within the San Juan River Basin under Changing Climate Conditions

Miller, W. P.; Butler, Robert A.; Piechota, Thomas C.; Prairie, James; Grantz, Katrina; DeRosa, Gina

doi:10.1061/(asce)wr.1943-5452.0000237

Cited by 18 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…The water resources in the CRB are currently allocated to seven states and Mexico for consumption, irrigation, and hydropower, among other uses. The importance of the CRB for water management and decision making, together with strong evidence of a shift in the hydroclimatology over the past decades (e.g., Miller andPiechota 2008, 2011), has motivated several studies to generate streamflow projections under different future climate scenarios (e.g., Milly et al 2005;Christensen and Lettenmaier 2007;Hoerling et al 2009; Bureau of Reclamation 2012). We conduct this study over three basins in the Colorado headwaters region-Yampa River at Steamboat Springs, East River at Almont, and Animas River at Durangowhose location and elevation ranges are shown in Fig.…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Changes in snowpack can therefore have a large impact on hydrologic processes within the Colorado headwaters (Miller and Piechota 2008). The water resources in the CRB are currently allocated to seven states and Mexico for consumption, irrigation, and hydropower, among other uses.…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This situation is particularly critical for the Colorado River basin (CRB) because of the susceptibility of runoff variations due to changes in precipitation and temperature, which stem from changes in evapotranspiration ET processes and snowpack accumulation-melt patterns (Christensen and Lettenmaier 2007). This vulnerability, together with the importance of the CRB for water resources supply for the growing regions of western and southwestern United States, has motivated many climate change studies in this area based on different modeling approaches and therefore resulting in a diverse set of conclusions (Milly et al 2005;Christensen and Lettenmaier 2007;Hoerling and Eischeid 2007;Ray et al 2008;Hoerling et al 2009;Rasmussen et al 2011Rasmussen et al , 2014Miller et al 2011Miller et al , 2012Vano et al 2012Vano et al , 2014.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Poulin et al (2011) used two different hydrological models to compare the effects of model structure against parameter equifinality on the uncertainty of hydrologic simulations, finding that model structure uncertainty dominates. More recently, Miller et al (2012) found that hydrologic model choice has a large effect on the portrayal of climate change impact in the San Juan River basin. Vano et al (2012) evaluated hydrologic changes due to perturbed climate scenarios using six hydrologic-land surface models in the CRB, demonstrating large intermodel differences in runoff changes due to shifts in precipitation and temperature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Effects of Hydrologic Model Choice and Calibration on the Portrayal of Climate Change Impacts

Mendoza

Clark

Mizukami

et al. 2015

Journal of Hydrometeorology

111

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The assessment of climate change impacts on water resources involves several methodological decisions, including choices of global climate models (GCMs), emission scenarios, downscaling techniques, and hydrologic modeling approaches. Among these, hydrologic model structure selection and parameter calibration are particularly relevant and usually have a strong subjective component. The goal of this research is to improve understanding of the role of these decisions on the assessment of the effects of climate change on hydrologic processes. The study is conducted in three basins located in the Colorado headwaters region, using four different hydrologic model structures [PRMS, VIC, Noah LSM, and Noah LSM with multiparameterization options (Noah-MP)]. To better understand the role of parameter estimation, model performance and projected hydrologic changes (i.e., changes in the hydrology obtained from hydrologic models due to climate change) are compared before and after calibration with the University of Arizona shuffled complex evolution (SCE-UA) algorithm. Hydrologic changes are examined via a climate change scenario where the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) change signal is used to perturb the boundary conditions of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model configured at 4-km resolution. Substantial intermodel differences (i.e., discrepancies between hydrologic models) in the portrayal of climate change impacts on water resources are demonstrated. Specifically, intermodel differences are larger than the mean signal from the CCSM-WRF climate scenario examined, even after the calibration process. Importantly, traditional single-objective calibration techniques aimed to reduce errors in runoff simulations do not necessarily improve intermodel agreement (i.e., same outputs from different hydrologic models) in projected changes of some hydrological processes such as evapotranspiration or snowpack.

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Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Effects of Hydrologic Model Choice and Calibration on the Portrayal of Climate Change Impacts

Mendoza

Clark

Mizukami

et al. 2015

Journal of Hydrometeorology

111

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“…The number of GCMs selected in these studies ranges from one to nine. Other studies have used results from all the individual climate models, which allows researchers to estimate a range of possible outcomes for any particular climate change scenario (Giacomoni and Berglund, 2015;Kollat et al, 2012;Miller et al, 2012). The model performance differs with region and with the type of variable simulated (Anandhi et al, 2011b;Anandhi and Nanjundiah, 2015;Errasti et al, 2011).…”

Section: Gcm Performance and Convergencementioning

confidence: 99%

Synthetic Scenarios from CMIP5 Model Simulations for Climate Change Impact Assessments in Managed Ecosystems and Water Resources: Case Study in South Asian Countries

2016

Trans. ASABE

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Wavelet‐based time series bootstrap model for multidecadal streamflow simulation using climate indicators

Erkyihun

Rajagopalan

Zagona

et al. 2016

Water Resources Research

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A model to generate stochastic streamflow projections conditioned on quasi‐oscillatory climate indices such as Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multi‐decadal Oscillation (AMO) is presented. Recognizing that each climate index has underlying band‐limited components that contribute most of the energy of the signals, we first pursue a wavelet decomposition of the signals to identify and reconstruct these features from annually resolved historical data and proxy based paleoreconstructions of each climate index covering the period from 1650 to 2012. A K‐Nearest Neighbor block bootstrap approach is then developed to simulate the total signal of each of these climate index series while preserving its time‐frequency structure and marginal distributions. Finally, given the simulated climate signal time series, a K‐Nearest Neighbor bootstrap is used to simulate annual streamflow series conditional on the joint state space defined by the simulated climate index for each year. We demonstrate this method by applying it to simulation of streamflow at Lees Ferry gauge on the Colorado River using indices of two large scale climate forcings: Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multi‐decadal Oscillation (AMO), which are known to modulate the Colorado River Basin (CRB) hydrology at multidecadal time scales. Skill in stochastic simulation of multidecadal projections of flow using this approach is demonstrated.

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Water Management Decisions Using Multiple Hydrologic Models within the San Juan River Basin under Changing Climate Conditions

Cited by 18 publications

References 14 publications

Effects of Hydrologic Model Choice and Calibration on the Portrayal of Climate Change Impacts

Effects of Hydrologic Model Choice and Calibration on the Portrayal of Climate Change Impacts

Synthetic Scenarios from CMIP5 Model Simulations for Climate Change Impact Assessments in Managed Ecosystems and Water Resources: Case Study in South Asian Countries

Wavelet‐based time series bootstrap model for multidecadal streamflow simulation using climate indicators

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