Global Change and Extreme Hydrology Testing Conventional Wisdom (2011) / Chapter Skim
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From page 6... ...
The second category assesses the status of translating the scientific knowledge base across the climate and hydrologic science communities. The third category identifies opportunities for progress to better unite the scientific perspectives and increase their usefulness in the water resource planning and management arenas.
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. But for the associated hydrologic variables, results are mixed using standard hydrologic measures.
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indicated that major climate-induced changes occur on the scale of thousands of years, Bulletin 17B assumed that floods are unaffected by the shorter-term changes that have been documented in the context of anthropogenically induced climate change. Participants discussed the United States' unmet need for new flood-frequency guidelines that draw on advances in hydrologic and climate science over the past 25 years, an observation that is supported by presentations and agreement at a previous COHS workshop (NRC, 2008)
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This is precisely the scale at which the current state of the art in climate modeling is least robust and least certain -- and would create opportunities to harmonize traditional hydrologic field research carried out on more local domains with next-generation, high-resolution atmospheric modeling. Translating the Science of Hydrologic Extremes to the Policy and Management Sectors Management and mission-oriented agencies with public-sector responsibilities have been provided with marginally useful scientific information about the likely manifestations of future climate change.
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Planning and operations for water management and design of new projects require high-quality information in a site-specific context that the current generation of climate models cannot yet deliver to respond to realities dictated by regulation, current public policy, and other factors. There are insufficient interactions and knowledge exchange between climate scientists, water scientists, and engineers and practitioners to solve these challenges.
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Hydrologists can fill a critical niche at the interface between the climate science and engineering applications communities by translating research on climate extremes for the applications community. One key issue to resolve is how the nature of extremes in the atmospheric phase of the hydrologic cycle translates into extreme hydrologic events. In the Southwest, where floods are generated by multiple mechanisms such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and snowmelt, understanding of the sources of floods has been advanced by analyses of the atmospheric
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To accommodate water planning and management in the context of an accelerating hydrologic cycle, workshop participants discussed a modern-era version of this program that would emphasize decision-based frameworks that incorporate risk and uncertainty from climate variability as well as other aspects of hydrologic change such as land management and hydraulic engineering impacts, including their associated uncertainties. Results from new environmental surveillance technologies that detect changes in extremes -- for example, satellite remote sensing of groundwater fluctuations to micro-sensor arrays for soil moisture, data assimilation, econometric and coupled water resource system decision support tools -- will arm policy-makers and managers with up-to-date monitoring capabilities and thus will better inform their decision-making processes.
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The next generation of observational networks may include paleoclimatic and paleohydrologic data sets as well as newer technologies, such as precipitation radars, to augment basic data from stream gage networks. Closing The COHS-hosted workshop raised many questions and challenges in terms of characterizing hydrologic extremes, translating scientific knowledge to the policy and management communities, and identifying a productive future role for hydrologic sciences.
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14 Global Change and Extreme Hydrology: Testing Conventional Wisdom climate adaptation strategy. The workshop was admittedly a modest step forward in uniting the perspectives of a broad research community in climate and hydrology as well as planners and engineers.
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