Ben Livneh is an assistant professor in the department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, a Fellow of the University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and the director of the Western Water Assessment. His research group focuses on solving problems in the field of physical hydrology, with specific interests into how land cover and climate changes will affect water availability across the western U.S. Recent projects have focused on changes in snowpack and drought prediction in the Colorado River Basin, as well as studying post-wildfire hydrology and water quality along the Front Range. Livneh is actively engaged in efforts to understand future hydrology in our region and he leads the NOAA-funded CMIP6 Task Force.
Abstract
Living in the Extreme: Snow Drought Impacts and the Future of Water Supply Predictability in the Western US
Seasonal water supply predictions across the western U.S. rely on knowledge of spring snow information, since snow represents a greater storage of water than man-made reservoirs for many of these systems. A warmer future portends for less precipitation falling in the form of snow, which represents an acute challenge for predicting seasonal runoff in order to allocate resources—particularly critical during drought. The presentation begins with an investigation into recent ‘snow drought’ for parts of the west, followed by an evaluation into how the relationship between snowpack and streamflow is expected to evolve as temperatures rise through the end of this century. Preliminary results indicate that contribution of snowpack to predictive skill is greatly reduced in key regions, particularly in maritime climates and lower elevation mountains, whereas predictive capabilities in cooler, higher elevation zones tend to show greater resilience to warming. Ancillary predictors like accumulated precipitation and soil moisture can aid in recovering some fraction of the lost skill. Lastly, we present the findings from a set of idealized experiments to quantify the impact of non-stationary snow conditions on seasonal drought forecasts relative to the impacts from warm-season precipitation non-stationarity. Overall, this work seeks to understand strategies for enhancing drought prediction capabilities amidst a changing climate.