Steven Hostetler, Ph.D.
Biography
STEVEN W. HOSTETLER
PRESENT ADDRESS
U.S. Geological Survey Telephone: (541) 737-8928
College of Earth, Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences email: steve@coas.oregonstate.edu
Oregon State University
Corvallis, Oregon 97331
EDUCATION
Ph.D Geography (climate change, numerical modeling), University of Oregon, 12/87
M.S. Mathematics (numerical analysis), University of Oregon, 8/84
B.S. Civil Engineering (hydrology), Ohio State University, 6/73
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE
Research Hydrologist GS-15 (full Professor equivalent), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Water Resources Division since December 1989
Project Chief of Lake-Atmosphere Interactions Project, 1992-present
Visiting Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado 1988-1995
Affiliate Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1995-1999
Courtesy Appointment, Department of Geosciences , Oregon State University, 1994-present
NSF Review Panel for Earth System History, 1997-1999
Member NCAR Scientific Computing Division Advisory Panel, 1998-2000
Member Scientific Advisory Council, USGS Global Change Research and Development Program, 2011-,
Research Advisor, National Research Program, 2012-
Graduate Student Committees
Collectively, has served on more than a dozen doctoral and masters graduate student committees with projects that span a diversity of topics including modeling the effects of hydrology and climate, modeling and monitoring glacier dynamics, climate change and disturbance, and cosmogenic dating among others.
Science and Products
Webinar: The Potential Influence of Changing Climate on the Persistence of Rocky Mountain Native Salmonids: What Information Will We Need to Manage for the Future?
View this webinar to learn more about managing salmonids in a changing climate.
Integrating ecological forecasting methods to improve applications for natural resource management: An invasive species example
Projecting the effects of climate change on plant and animal species distributions and abundance is critical to successful long‐term conservation and restoration efforts. There have been significant recent advances made in the areas of: (1) climate forecasts; (2) habitat niche modeling; (3) mechanistic modeling; and (4) observation techniques and networks. However, projections of biological...
Understanding Extreme Climate Events in the North Central U.S.
The climate of the North Central U.S. is driven by a combination of factors, including atmospheric circulation patterns, the region’s complex topography which extends from the High Rockies to the Great Plains, and variations in hydrology. Together, these factors determine the sustainability of the region’s ecosystems and the services that they provide communities. In order to understand the...
A Visualization Approach for Projecting Future Climate Distributions in North America
Conservation and natural resource managers require information about potential future climate changes for the areas they manage, in terms that are relevant for the specific biotic and environmental resources likely to be affected by climate change. We produced a suite of data sets that provide managers with climate and climate-derived data and a visualization approach that allows managers to...
Downscaled Climate Change Modeling for the Conterminous United States (National Assessment)
This project produced long simulations (multi-decadal to multi-century in scale) of past, present, and future regional climate at a grid spacing of 50 kilometers (km) over North America and at a grid spacing of 15 km over western and eastern North America. These model runs were the first attempt to achieve coordinated, high-resolution downscaling with such wide geographic and temporal coverage...
Science to Inform Future Management of the Nation's Fisheries and Aquatic Habitat
Fisheries and aquatic habitats throughout the United States are in dire need of protection or restoration because human activities have resulted in severe degradation of those habitats. Further, future climatic changes will continue to affect human land-use, temperature, and water flows. Natural resource managers need to identify and prioritize habitats so that limited time and funding can be...
Using information from global climate models to inform policymaking—The role of the U.S. Geological Survey
This report provides an overview of model-based climate science in a risk management context. In addition, it summarizes how the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) will continue to follow best scientific practices and when and how the results of this research will be delivered to the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) and other stakeholders to...
Terando, Adam; Reidmiller, David; Hostetler, Steven W.; Littell, Jeremy S.; Beard, T. Douglas; Weiskopf, Sarah R.; Belnap, Jayne; Plumlee, Geoffrey S.
Application of a regional climate model to assess changes in the climatology of the Eastern US and Cuba associated with historic landcover change
We examine the annual, seasonal, monthly, and diurnal climate responses to the land use change (LUC) in eastern United States and Cuba during four epochs (1650, 1850, 1920, and 1992) with ensemble simulations conducted with the RegCM4 regional climate model that includes the Biosphere Atmosphere Transfer Scheme (BATS1e) surface physics package (...
Hostetler, Steven W.; Reker, R; Alder, Jay R.; Loveland, Thomas; Willard, Debra A.; Bernhardt, Christopher E.; Sundquist, Eric T.; Thompson, Renee L. The dependence of hydroclimate projections in snow‐dominated regions of the western United States on the choice of statistically downscaled climate data
We assess monthly temperature and precipitation data produced by four statistically based techniques that were used to downscale general circulation models (GCMs) in the Climate Model Intercomparison Program Phase 5 (CMIP5) (Taylor et al., 2012). We drive a simple water-balance model with the downscaled data to demonstrate the effect of the...
Alder, Jay R.; Hostetler, Steven W. Applying the Community Ice Sheet Model to evaluate PMIP3 LGM climatologies over the North American ice sheets
We apply the Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM2) to determine the extent to which the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) temperature and precipitation climatologies from the Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project 3 (PMIP3) simulations support the large North American ice sheets that were prescribed as a boundary condition. We force CISM2 with eight...
Alder, Jay R.; Hostetler, Steven W. Atmospheric and surface climate associated with 1986–2013 wildfires in North America
We analyze climate simulations conducted with the RegCM3 regional climate model on 50‐ and 15‐km model grids to diagnose the dependence of wildfire incidence and area burned variations on monthly climate long‐term means and anomalies over North America for the period 1986–2013. We created a new wildfire database by merging the Fire Program...
Hostetler, Steven W.; Bartlein, Patrick J.; Alder, Jay R. A North American Hydroclimate Synthesis (NAHS) of the Common Era
This study presents a synthesis of century-scale hydroclimate variations in North America for the Common Era (last 2000 years) using new age models of previously published multiple proxy-based paleoclimate data. This North American Hydroclimate Synthesis (NAHS) examines regional hydroclimate patterns and related environmental indicators,...
Rodysill, Jessica R. ; Anderson, Lesleigh; Cronin, Thomas M.; Jones, Miriam C.; Thompson, Robert S.; Wahl, David B.; Willard, Debra A.; Addison, Jason A.; Alder, Jay R.; Anderson, Katherine H.; Anderson, Lysanna; Barron, John A.; Bernhardt, Christopher E.; Hostetler, Steven W.; Kehrwald, Natalie M.; Khan, Nicole; Richey, Julie N.; Starratt, Scott W.; Strickland, Laura E.; Toomey, Michael; Treat, Claire C.; Wingard, G. Lynn The NorWeST summer stream temperature model and scenarios for the western U.S.: A crowd-sourced database and new geospatial tools foster a user-community and predict broad climate warming of rivers and streams
Thermal regimes are fundamental determinants of aquatic ecosystems, which makes description and prediction of temperatures critical during a period of rapid global change. The advent of inexpensive temperature sensors dramatically increased monitoring in recent decades, and although most monitoring is done by individuals for agency‐specific...
Isaak, Daniel J.; Wenger, Seth J.; Peterson, Erin E.; Ver Hoef, Jay M; Nagel, David E; Luce, Charlie H.; Hostetler, Steven W.; Dunham, Jason B.; Roper, Brett B.; Wollrab, Sherry P; Chandler, Gwynne L; Horan, Dona L; Parkes-Payne, Sharon Coastal eolian sand-ramp development related to paleo-sea-level changes during the Latest Pleistocene and Holocene (21–0 ka) in San Miguel Island, California, U.S.A.
Coastal eolian sand ramps (5–130 m elevation) on the northern slope (windward) side of the small San Miguel Island (13 km in W-E length) range in age from late Pleistocene to modern time, though a major hiatus in sand-ramp growth occurred during the early Holocene marine transgression (16–9 ka). The Holocene sand ramps (1–5 m measured thicknesses...
Peterson, Curt D.; Erlandson, Jon M.; Stock, Errol; Hostetler, Steven W.; Price, David M. Final Laurentide ice-sheet deglaciation and Holocene climate-sea level change
Despite elevated summer insolation forcing during the early Holocene, global ice sheets retained nearly half of their volume from the Last Glacial Maximum, as indicated by deglacial records of global mean sea level (GMSL). Partitioning the GMSL rise among potential sources requires accurate dating of ice-sheet extent to estimate ice-sheet volume....
Ullman, David J.; Carlson, Anders E.; Hostetler, Steven W.; Clark, Peter U.; Cuzzone, Joshua; Milne, Glenn A.; Winsor, Kelsey; Caffee, Marc A. Implementation and evaluation of a monthly water balance model over the US on an 800 m grid
We simulate the 1950–2010 water balance for the conterminous U.S. (CONUS) with a monthly water balance model (MWBM) using the 800 m Parameter-elevation Regression on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) data set as model input. We employed observed snow and streamflow data sets to guide modification of the snow and potential evapotranspiration...
Hostetler, Steven W.; Alder, Jay R. Accommodation space in a high-wave-energy inner-shelf during the Holocene marine transgression: Correlation of onshore and offshore inner-shelf deposits (0–12 ka) in the Columbia River littoral cell system, Washington and Oregon, USA
The Columbia River Littoral Cell (CRLC), a high-wave-energy littoral system, extends 160 km alongshore, generally north of the large Columbia River, and 10–15 km in across-shelf distance from paleo-beach backshores to about 50 m present water depths. Onshore drill holes (19 in number and 5–35 m in subsurface depth) and offshore...
Peterson, C. D.; Twichell, D. C.; Roberts, M. C.; Vanderburgh, S.; Hostetler, Steven W. Slow climate velocities of mountain streams portend their role as refugia for cold-water biodiversity
The imminent demise of montane species is a recurrent theme in the climate change literature, particularly for aquatic species that are constrained to networks and elevational rather than latitudinal retreat as temperatures increase. Predictions of widespread species losses, however, have yet to be fulfilled despite decades of climate change,...
Isaak, Daniel J.; Young, Michael K.; Luce, Charles H; Hostetler, Steven W.; Wenger, Seth J.; Peterson, Erin E.; Ver Hoef, Jay; Groce, Matthew C.; Horan, Dona L.; Nagel, David E.
Climate associations with North American wildfires between 1986-2013
This article is part of the Spring 2019 issue of the Earth Science Matters Newsletter.
National Climate Change Viewer data used in an evaluation comparing statistical downscaling methods and data sets
A comprehensive evaluation comparing hydroclimate projections derived from six statistically downscaled data sets, including data underpinning the National Climate Change Viewer (NCCV) was recently published.
Climate models: applications to understand past climates and climate change
This article is part of the Fall 2015 issue of the Earth Science Matters Newsletter.