Our partner sites:
California Nevada Climate Data Archive
California Climate Change Portal

Linking global climate models with groundwater-surface water models A new study for the Central California Valley

Percent reduction in discharge (millions of cubic meters) from the principal surrounding watersheds of the California Central Valley from early to late in the 21st century.

CNAP researchers (led by Randy Hanson) recently published an article discussing the development of a modeling system that links global climate models with regional hydrologic models, using the California Central Valley as a case study. This method employs a supply and demand framework that can be used to simulate and analyze potential climate change and conjunctive use. Application of this method demonstrates the potential transition from predominantly surface water to groundwater supply for agriculture with secondary effects that may limit this transition of conjunctive use. Please click here for personal use copy

CNAP researchers recently published an article examining how western U.S. streamflow may change during the warm season. They found the warm season climate warming will be a key driver of annual streamflow changes in four major river basins of the western U.S., as shown by hydrological model simulations using fixed precipitation and idealized seasonal temperature changes based on climate projections with SRES A2 forcing. Warm season (April-September) warming reduces streamflow throughout the year; streamflow declines both immediately and in the subsequent cool season. Cool season (October-March) warming, by contrast, increases streamflow immediately, partially compensating for streamflow reductions during the subsequent warm season.

• Heat Waves over California and Nevada: Signal of an Increasing Trend

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• Southern California Marine Layer Clouds

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• Does the future hold more floods for California's Sierra Nevada?

  CNAP researchers recently published an article examining a potential increase in flooding over California's Sierra Nevada. Using streamflow as simulated from downscaled global climate models, the researchers examined possible changes in annual maximum 3-day flood magnitudes and frequencies. They found statistically significant increases in flood magnitude for the later part of this century. Click here for personal use copy of full article

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• ARkStorm: Extreme winter storm scenario for California

  CNAP researchers have been involved in a USGS MultiHazards Demonstration Project effort to develop and provide considerable detail for a scenario that would help emergency managers to plan and prepare for the something like the worst winter storm you can think of for California. The result was a scenario that has been labelled the "ARkStorm" and a paper describing the process and resulting scenario has come out in the journal Natural Hazards (Please click here for a personal use copy)

  Figure 1 from article: Composite SSM/I satellite image of vertically integrated water vapor (g cm-2; color bar at bottom) constructed from polar-orbiting swaths in the 12 h prior to 10 am UTC 14 October 2009. The atmospheric river indicated here channeled water vapor from a decaying typhoon over the western North Pacific, across nearly the entire width of the ocean basin, to deposit copious rains over the central coast of California

  Read more on our ARkStorm web page

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• 2008 Climate Action Team Report

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• Wildfire Forecasts

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• Our Changing Climate: Assessing the Risks to California

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• Climate Science and the CALFED Bay-Delta Program

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• Climate and Wildfire in the western United States

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• San Diego 2050 Changing Climate Report

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• From climate-change spaghetti to climate-change distributions for 21st Century California

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• Climate and Human Health

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• INFORM: Integrated Forecast and Management; increasing water-use efficiency

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• Climate/Ground-Water Simulations for the Ventura Ground-Water Basin

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MTNCLIM 2010
MTNCLIM 2010 was held June 2010 in Blue River, Oregon

Climate Variability and CALFED