Workshop Series on Climate Change
Planning for Climate Change Through an Integrative Approach to Water-Planning, Climate Downscaling, and Robust Decision-Making: Fall 2009 — Spring 2010
The water supplies of central Arizona will likely be affected by increasing temperatures and changes in precipitation that are associated with climate change. Scientists are currently working to improve the ability of climate models at the global scale to represent physical processes at the land surface within regions and to produce information that is useful for water supply planning. To date, climate change data and models are very difficult for planners and water managers to use, and there is much uncertainty about the best way to use them to make decisions.
Arizona Water Institute (AWI), Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC) and the Decision Theater (DT) have created a special workshop series to bring together scientists and practitioners to address the challenge of using climate change data for watershed and water resource planning. DCDC and DT are the hosts of this workshop series. DCDC is conceived at the interface of the water governance community and the social and climate change scientist community to support collaboration through translational activities. The DT is a laboratory for exploring and understanding decision-making in complex and uncertain systems, with a special focus on today’s emerging sustainability challenges. This series of workshops will be held in tandem with a regionalization or “downscaling” of global climate models through the efforts of the University of Arizona. The overarching goal is to achieve a better understanding of regional water supply availability under future conditions.
Workshop I: Paleohydrology
Attendees at the paleohydrology workshop included people from these agencies as well as Tucson Water, City of Scottsdale, the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the Sonoran Institute. The workshop was available via online
streaming video for those unable to attend in person.
The goals of the workshop were to explore the applications of paleohydrologic data to water resource planning and examine the potential for using scenarios from paleodata for drought planning. To accomplish these goals, the workshop featured presentations that included background information on how reconstructions of past flows are developed from tree rings, information about reconstructions available for the upper and lower Colorado River basin, paleoflood analyses and data, applications of paleohydrologic data to water resource management, and an introduction to scenarios in water resource planning.
A special feature of the workshop was a demonstration of the WaterSim model in the ASU Decision Theater. WaterSim is a simulation of water supply and demand for the Phoenix metropolitan area that integrates information about climate, land use, population growth, and water policy. For this workshop, the reconstructions of Colorado and Salt/Verde river flows were used to run WaterSim, allowing simulations that incorporated the broader range of hydrology in the paleo records to be assessed.
The success of this workshop is the result of hard work on the part of many people both at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University. We would like to thank all the presenters and people who attended the workshop. We would like particularly thank Connie Woodhouse, Kathy Jacobs and Gregg Garfin for their hard work and commitment to making this a success.
