Desert Research Institute

Adapting to climate change requires that decision makers have information that is salient, credible, and legitimate. The research efforts in this project represent a first attempt to reduce the gap between the supply of and demand for climate information by creating a comprehensive database of climate service providers in the western United States.

Importance: This project was initiated at the request of the NOAA Western Region Climate Services director, who was looking for guidance about ongoing climate service activities in the region. The project evolved into a searchable public database that allows those seeking climate services to easily access information about regional providers.

Climate Service Provider Database: https://wrcc.dri.edu/ClimSvcProviders/

Initiated in 2002, WestMap was designed to provide online fine-scale gridded climate data and analysis tools. The idea for WestMap was developed by a consortium of RISA teams, NOAA partners, and interested stakeholders and was intended to deliver information that was explicitly called-for by stakeholders and researchers in CLIMAS and other RISAs.

The purpose of this project is to investigate Colorado River basin droughts, and the climatic factors that influence those droughts. The project uses paleoclimatic data to extend instrumental climate and flow records, along with climate change projections to assess the range of possible conditions that may be expected to occur and to determine how warming temperatures may influence river flow and water supply in the future.

Beginning with a seminal workshop in 2000, organized by CLIMAS and University of Arizona scientists, CLIMAS has been a leader in the process of bridging the worlds of fire managers and climate researchers. The initial workshop in 2000 spawned two workshops in 2001: Fire and Climate in the Southwest and Fire and Climate 2001 in the West. The success of these meetings led to the 2002 Fire in the West workshop. These annual workshops brought fire managers, applied fire researchers, and climate forecasters together to exchange information and ideas. This process has evolved into a partnership to evaluate the potential for significant wildland fire activity, which became institutionalized in the form of the National Seasonal Assessment Workshops (2003-2012), and fully operationalized by the National Interagency Coordination Center.

The National Seasonal Assessment Workshops (NSAW) were developed by a partnership between CLIMAS, the National Interagency Coordination Center’s Predictive Services (NICC), and the Program for Climate, Ecosystem and Fire Applications (CEFA) at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. The impetus for the partnership and associated workshops is to improve information available to fire management decision makers for allocation of firefighting resources at local, regional, and national scales. The collaboration is grounded in a commitment to sustained interaction between partnering institutions, equality in partnership, and clear partnership responsibilities.

In collaboration with 11 Geographic Area Coordination Centers (GACCs), NOAA Climate Prediction Center, California Applications Program RISA, Western Water Assessment RISA, Southeast Climate Consortium RISA, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Experimental Climate Prediction Center, and others, the NSAWs brought together fire meteorologists, fire behavior analysts, fuel specialists, fire managers, climate forecasters, and climate researchers for a focused exchange of ideas and work sessions. The workshop participants produced pre-season fire potential outlooks for the eastern half of the U.S. (in January each year), and the western half of the U.S. plus Alaska (in late March or early April each year).

In 2007, the National Interagency Coordination Center’s Predictive Services began to operationalize national monthly and seasonal outlooks, on an experimental basis. Since then, these “monthly-seasonal outlooks” are produced by NICC, with input from partners in the applied climate forecasting and fire management and research communities. CLIMAS continues to be involved with fire prediction efforts, primarily through the work of CLIMAS affiliate, Tim Brown and through the North American Climate Services Partnership.

From its inception, the CLIMAS research agenda has been guided by feedback from a wide variety of stakeholders who use climate information to make decisions about their operations. Many of the people interviewed in the CLIMAS pilot study expressed dissatisfaction with the way climate information systems portray rural climate conditions.

There is a sense of metropolitan bias in the information they receive and rely upon, particularly for those located some distance from the metropolitan centers of Tucson or Phoenix. This bias neglects the very different climates of regions outside of Tucson or Phoenix. Moreover, stakeholders consistently expressed an interest in easily accessible climate data at "local" spatial scales, e.g., the size of small ranching and farming operations.

In response to stakeholder requests for fine-scale climate data, we created a research project to develop models for interpolating winter climate data for the Southwest to 1 km2 resolution. Our goal was to make this climate knowledge useful to regional stakeholders of climate information as well as other researchers.

The winter season was selected as the initial temporal study period, because of the crucial role precipitation plays in the recharge of dams, aquifers, and reservoirs, and for overlap with the CLIMAS paleoclimate project that deals with winter moisture. Topography is the major source of spatial variability in climate data at these spatial scales, and therefore the models were based on terrain variables such as elevation, slope, aspect, latitude, and longitude.

This project aimed to identify patterns of local and regional climate variability in these datasets and the atmospheric features that control southwestern climate. Results were intended to be suitable for use in climatic and other environmental studies by public and private stakeholders.

This project assessed the impact that the National Seasonal Assessment Workshop (NSAW) seasonal and monthly fire outlooks have on decision makers who collaborate to manage wildfires in the western U.S. Researchers asked who uses the in­formation in these products, for what purposes, and the economic benefits of using them. This project evaluated how these products are being used and also analyzed network patterns across regional and federal networks of fire management to see how information was communicated across agencies.