November 21, 2022
Assessing Long-Term Climate Changes in Mountainous Watershed Across Space and Time
Scientists develop a framework to better understand watershed’s response to climate change over space and time.
Grouping 17 locations of the Colorado East River watershed into clusters of sites with similar characteristics.
[Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) from Faybishenko, B., et al. "Statistical Framework to Assess Long-Term Spatio-Temporal Climate Changes: East River Mountainous Watershed Case Study." Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment (2022). DOI:10.1007/s00477-022-02327-7.]
The Science
Researchers developed a new statistical framework to assess changes in climatic conditions using data from 1966 to 2021 from 17 meteorological stations across the East River watershed near Crested Butte, Colo., which is a typical watershed in the Upper Colorado River Basin providing freshwater to millions of Americans. Grouping similar watershed areas into zones using hierarchical clustering of site locations for three temporal segments of the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) showed significant temporal-spatial shifts, indicating that dynamic climatic processes drive zonation patterns.
The Impact
Mountainous watersheds provide 60–80% of Earth’s freshwater in addition to other life-sustaining ecosystem services, such as air and water quality regulation and carbon sequestration. Analyzing long-term spatial and temporal climate data in these important regions can help scientists understand how these critical ecosystems may respond, or are already responding, to changing climate. Scientists developed a statistical framework to assess changes in climatic conditions in Colorado’s East River Watershed. The assessment indicates considerable changes in climatic conditions with time and space, demonstrating that not only is climate change affecting the watershed, but different zones are responding in different ways. Understanding these changes can help researchers predict and monitor how the ecosystems, in addition to services they provide, may change to better adapt to climate change.
Summary
Researchers developed a statistical framework to assess long-term temporal and spatial variability of meteorological conditions including temperature, dewpoint, precipitation, relative humidity, and wind speed, as well as time series of potential and actual evapotranspiration, Standardized Precipitation Index, and SPEI. Calculations were conducted from 1966 to 2021 for 17 locations of meteorological stations located within the East River watershed in Colorado. Time series segmentation analysis and zonation demonstrate considerable changes in climatic conditions with a non-uniform response across the watershed. A significant shift in cluster arrangements for the temporal segments indicates that zonation patterns are driven by dynamic climatic processes, which are variable through time and space. Therefore, the watershed climatic zonation requires periodic re-evaluation based on climatic changes with space and time.
Principal Investigator
Boris Faybishenko
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
[email protected]
Co-Principal Investigator
Eoin Brodie
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
[email protected]
Funding
The work was conducted as part of the Watershed Function Science Focus Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is supported by the Biological and Environmental Research Program within the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science under Contract Number DE-AC02-05CH11231.
References
Faybishenko, B., et al. "Statistical Framework to Assess Long-Term Spatio-Temporal Climate Changes: East River Mountainous Watershed Case Study." Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-022-02327-7.