HR: 09:45h
AN: GC31A-08    [Abstracts]
TI: Assessing the Relative Impact of Climate Forecast Uncertainty and Climate Change on Water Resources Management
AU: * Jain, S
EM: Shaleen.Jain@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center, 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305
AU: Sardeshmukh, P D
EM: Prashant.D.Sardeshmukh@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center, 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305
AU: Pulwarty, R S
EM: Roger.Pulwarty@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center, 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305
AB: Water sector is often thought of as a primary beneficiary of improved climate forecasts. An understanding of the climate variability and change also has considerable implications for water and environmental management. Given the probabilistic nature of climate forecasts and estimates of future climate change, however, the potential impact of uncertain climate on, say, reservoir decisions are not well understood. A simple statistical framework is used here to understand the conditional forecast distribution of runoff volume based on a climate forecast. Three contributing factors are examined: a. the correlation between the climate precursor (say, El Nino-Southern Oscillation) and the target variable (here, runoff volume), b. the forecast uncertainty itself, which can be strongly case-dependent, and c. changes in the climate-runoff relationships in a changing climate. The impact of forecast-type (climatology, climate information with no uncertainty, and climate information with uncertainty) on the runoff volume distribution is quantified for a simple reservoir system. Knowledge of the forecast uncertainty in runoff volumes, together with reservoir operation constraints, enables an a priori identification of cases when the probabilistic forecast is likely to be most or least useful for a particular reservoir system. Finally, the usefulness of simple decision trees and sensitivity analyses for water and environmental decision-making is discussed.
DE: 1630 Impacts of global change (1225)
DE: 1880 Water management (6334)
DE: 1884 Water supply
DE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty
DE: 6344 System operation and management
SC: Global Climate Change [GC]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005