Managing Water Resources in the West Under Conditions of Climate Uncertainty A Proceedings (1991) / Chapter Skim
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At the request of the Bureau of Reclamation, a committee of the Water Science and Technology Board convened a colloquium on November 14-16, 1990, to draw together material on climate change and climate variability and to explore possible water management responses. This proceedings contains an overview of that colloquium, "Managing Water Resources in the West Under Conditions of Climate Uncertainty," and the individual papers presented there.
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All present- participants from academia, industry, and government were eager to discuss the implications of possible climate change and to find ways to increase the resilience of our water systems in the face of increased uncertainty. SHARING WATER RESOURCES Edith Brown Weiss began the colloquium with a keynote address entitled "Sharing Water Resources with Future Gener
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The colloquium also explored management responses to climate variability and the affected publics, both present and future. THE SCIENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND CLIMATE VARIABILITY The late Roger Revelle opened the first session and commented broadly about factors that affect climate.
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Malcolm Hughes, David Meko, and Charles Stockton focused on paleo climate information, which scientists use to infer climate states prior to relatively recent direct measurement of climatic variables. The various paleo records indicate that the assumption of weak statistical stationarity (e.g., the average and variance do not change with time)
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Implications of Climate Variability for Management Stephen Burges and Bruce Kimball chaired the second session, which covered the specific topics of plant-water-atmospheric trace gas relationships, water sources, water resource management, economics, and water law. Leon Hartwell Allen examined the implications of global warming on plant growth, looking in particular at trace gas enriched and changed thermal environments.
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Demand management and water marketing are both potentially important tools for building system resiliency for managing water resources during droughts under present climatic variability as well as for accommodating possible long-term reductions in "natural" supply. Another significant issue that ties in with the work presented by Leon Hartwell Allen is the biological consequences of water use and climate variability.
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He also noted that it is important to maintain the existing network of long-term hydrologic measurement stations because, while imperfect, they provide the best available data base for comparison purposes. MANAGEMENT RESPONSES TO CLIMATE VARIABILITY Gilbert White chaired the third session, which focused on the types of management responses possible to cope with climate variability.
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Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations can increase plant production provided that there is adequate water. The combined uncertainties presented by the natural variability of western water regimes and the possible consequences of climate change are cause for improved water conservation and management of irrigated agriculture at all levels, from principal supplier to end user.
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The greatest potential benefits occur in threshold hydrologic environments where an increase in precipitation goes largely to streamflow production rather than to soil moisture retention.
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Hydrologic variability and its influence on water management was a significant component of many of the papers. In one discussion, Stephen Burges demonstrated examples of different forms of variability from a time series of tree ring data and an annual streamflow volume record from a hydrologic regime sensitive to climatic variations.
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Such work needs to be explored in threshold climatic regions where small perturbations could make substantial changes in the local vegetation and temporal water distribution pattern. Historical streamflow and surrogate records should be examined for their Possible use in validating the scenarios created with increasingly refined GCMs.
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When considering alternative operation policies for multiple water resource systems, flexibility is a crucial consideration. For example, in the Colorado River system it is unclear if there will be increased or decreased flow and how the flow patterns would be distributed differently in space and time throughout the system, even if the vegetation remained relatively constant.
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· Water users, principally farmers, can be active partners in efforts to improve water management if provided with incentives to adopt alternative, efficient water use practices. Innovative uses of federal facilities, such as making federal storage and distribution facilities available for water transfers even if federal water is not involved, should be evaluated carefully.
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Water Resources Research 26~10~:2249-2250. Lettenmaier, D
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