HR: 1340h
AN: H43A-0968    [Abstracts]
TI: Effects of Climate Variability on Water Storage in the Colorado River Basin
AU: * Hurkmans, R T
EM: ruud.hurkmans@wur.nl
AF: Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management, Wageningen University, P. O. Box 47, Wageningen, 6700 AA, Netherlands
AU: Durcik, M
EM: mdurcik@hwr.arizona.edu
AF: Hydrology and Water Resources, University of Arizona, 1133 E. James E. Rogers Way, Tucson, AZ 85721, United States
AU: Hasan, S
EM: shaakeel.hasan@wur.nl
AF: Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management, Wageningen University, P. O. Box 47, Wageningen, 6700 AA, Netherlands
AU: Troch, P A
EM: patroch@hwr.arizona.edu
AF: Hydrology and Water Resources, University of Arizona, 1133 E. James E. Rogers Way, Tucson, AZ 85721, United States
AB: The Colorado river is one of the most important sources of surface water in the Western United States and it is vital to drinking water supplies in the Southwestern United States. Estimating intra- and inter-annual variability of water storage in the basin is important for sustainable water management. Several methods to estimate basin scale terrestrial water storage (TWS) change were applied to the Colorado River basin. The methods reported here are the Basin-Scale Water Balance (BSWB) method and distributed hydrological modeling. The BSWB- method uses atmospheric moisture convergence and precipitable water from reanalysis data, together with naturalized streamflow. We use two different reanalysis datasets, i.e., the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts dataset, spanning the period from 1958 to 2005, and the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR), spanning the period from 1979 to 2005. The land surface hydrologic model (VIC: Variable Infiltration Capacity) is forced with gridded meteorological observations spanning the period between 1949 and 2005. The three TWS-change estimates show, apart from a strong annual cycle, a longer, near-decadal cycle. This suggests an impact of long-term climate variability. The hydrological regime in the Colorado basin has been linked to various indices of climate variability. Examples are the El-Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is the most important and the best predictable one, and the less predictable Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). In this study, a range of climate variability indices is investigated. When annual cycles are filtered out, especially ENSO, the East-Pacific/North-Pacific pattern and Scandinavia pattern seem to be correlated to the TWS-change signal in the Colorado basin, although this correlation is highest for the BSWB-NARR TWS-estimate. The combined effect of the climate variability modes influencing TWS in the Colorado basin is further examined. Although it is difficult to link a single climate index to TWS changes in the basin, investigating the effects of the combination of indices affecting TWS can potentially improve its predictability, contributing to sustainable water management in the region.
DE: 1807 Climate impacts
DE: 1833 Hydroclimatology
DE: 1880 Water management (6334)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting