Climate Research and Development Program

Mountain glaciers are dynamic reservoirs of frozen water closely coupled to ecosystems and climate. Glacier change in North America has major socioeconomic impacts, including global sea level change, tourism disruption, natural hazard risk, fishery effects, and water resource alteration. Understanding and quantifying precise connections between glaciers and climate is critical to decision makers...

The term environmental streamflows refers to the magnitude, frequency, seasonal timing, duration, and rate of change of streamflows needed to sustain freshwater and estuary ecosystems and human wellbeing. It is important that environmental streamflow assessments by water managers consider changes in climate, land use, and water management; this cannot be done effectively without understanding...

This project focuses on development of new interdisciplinary modeling capabilities of long-term time series that capture interactions among climate, land use, water use, and water availability. Research builds on expanding the USGS Forecasting Scenarios of Land Use (FORE-SCE) model and integrating with spatially explicit models from other disciplines. Interdisciplinary models will be co-developed...