GEOG3839.14, The West, water and the Colorado River

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Scott St. George

Educación

SURFACE TEMPERATURE
RECONSTRUCTIONS
FOR T H E LAS T 2 , 00 0 Y E A R S

NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL
OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES

Photograph: Nevada Tourism Media Relations

Photograph: Chazz Lane

Central Arizona Project

Water transfers in the American southwest

Courtesy Glen MacDonald

allocated to 7 basin states

15 MAF

Average river ﬂow, 1906 to 1922

18 MAF

allocated to Mexico

1½ MAF
allocated to 7 basin states

15 MAF

Average river ﬂow, 1906 to 1922

18 MAF

Observed discharge, Colorado River

Compact allocation (16.5 MAF)

UNITED STATES MEXICO
Arizona Sonora
California Baja California
Colorado
New Mexico
Nevada
Utah
Wyoming

Low reservoir

Photograph: Glen MacDonald

T H E W E S T, WA T E R A N D T H E C O L O R A D O R I V E R

Tree-ring display at elementary school

Photograph:Tom Swetnam

The history of precipitation and
runoﬀ in the Colorado Basin as
indicated by tree-rings

Edmund Shulman
Ph.D. Thesis
Harvard University
1944

water stress

narrow ring reduced photosynthesis

less cell expansion

reduced cell division

100%

EXPLAINED VARIANCE

St. George and Luckman
JJA temperature

0%

100%

EXPLAINED VARIANCE
Woodhouse et al.
Annual discharge

St. George and Luckman
JJA temperature

0%

stream gauge

tree-ring estimate

Source: Woodhouse et al., 2006

MEGADROUGHT
intensity at least equivalent to modern multiyear droughts

duration longer than the several years to decade thereof

Seager et al., Journal of Climate, 2008

“ Average reconstructed annual ﬂow
for the period 1844–1848 was lower

”
than the observed ﬂow for 1999–2004.
Woodhouse et al., 2006

“ The long-term perspective provided by
tree ring reconstructions points to looming
conﬂict between water demand and supply

”
in the upper Colorado River basin.
Woodhouse et al., 2006

Relic tree, circa 323 BC Harmon Canyon, Utah

1,200 years of Colorado River discharge Meko et al., GRL, 2007

“ The tree-ring record shows that droughts
lasting decades have routinely gripped

”
western North America.

Jonathan Overpeck and Bradley Udall

“ As western North America currently endures its
worst drought since 1900, it is important to realize
that this drought might be nothing compared to
what is possible in the future if megadrought and

”
even ho er temperatures coincide.

Jonathan Overpeck and Bradley Udall

Tree rings provided the central evidence that caused municipal water agencies to

“RETHINK OLD
ASSUMPTIONS”
about worst-case scenarios for reservoir operations and re-evaluate the
potential duration and geographic scope of severe drought.

READING FOR THURSDAY
David Meko and Connie Woodhouse (2010), Application of
streamﬂow reconstruction to water resources management.
M.K. Hughes et al. (eds.), Dendroclimatology, Developments in
Paleoenvironmental Research.

Please read the complete paper (eventually).

FOR NEXT CLASS
Read sections 8.3.3 and 8.3.4

“ They all laughed at me...
but I'LL SHOW THEM!
I'LL SHOW THEM ALL!!

”
BWAHAHAHAAA!

PLEASE WAIT
at least one day before asking
questions about your exam.

QUESTION 4
A common misconception is that dendrochronology
involves just counting tree rings. Describe three situations
that would lead simple ring counting to provide an
inaccurate estimate of tree age.

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In 1968, Benoit Mandelbrot and James Wallis published an article titled ‘Noah, Joseph, and operational Hydrology’ in the journal Water Resources Research. In it, they argued that hydrological models of the day were not able to estimate the true risk of extreme floods or prolonged drought, and that rare hydrological events were much more common than usually assumed. In this lecture, I’ll review how high-resolution paleoenvironmental archives can help us judge more accurately the risks posed by the ‘Noah’- and ‘Joseph’-style events described by Mandelbrot and Wallis. I’ll give particular emphasis to the environmental information recovered from the rings of ancient trees, and explain how dendrochronology (tree-ring research) has been used to redefine the ‘flood of record’, test potential avenues for long-lead climate predictions, and gage the performance of state-of-the-art climate models.

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As one of the most destructive hazards on our planet, floods kill thousands of people and cause billions of dollars in property damage every year. We usually try to gage the risk of future floods by fitting mathematic functions to hydrological data and then extrapolating the upper tail of those distributions. But because large floods are rare and river gage records are short, the conventional approach can sometimes drastically underestimate the threat posed to communities and infrastructure by extreme floods. In this lecture, I’ll argue that paleoflood hydrology — the study of ancient floods as recorded by river and lake sediments, trees, caves, and historical documents — is absolutely essential to judge the real risk of large, rare floods. And I’ll use examples from North America to illustrate how a ‘deeper river memory’ can help people evaluate their own vulnerability to floods, weigh the potential benefits of proposed infrastructure projects, and become more aware of what nature is truly capable of producing.

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Prolonged episodes of persistently dry or wet conditions are common features of most proxy-based reconstructions of past hydroclimatic variability. These so-called “Joseph” events might be due to external forcings that push sea-surface temperatures into warm or cold states, and thereby increase the likelihood of widespread megadroughts or megapluvials. Alternatively, internal ocean-atmosphere variability alone might be able to produce long-lasting and spatially extensive wet or dry intervals, even in the absence of any exotic external influences. In this study, we use a simple statistical emulator to establish benchmarks for decadal or multidecadal patterns in the western United States. We constructed a linear inverse model that included three key aspects of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (monthly sea-surface temperatures, zonal surface wind stress, and sea-surface height), and restricted the spatial domain of each field to include only the tropical Pacific. By also including western United States hydroclimate information in the LIM, we are able to test whether ENSO variability and stochastic weather ‘noise’ could be sufficient to create low-frequency coherence within proxy networks. More broadly, if simulated drought patterns generated by the LIM are able to match the frequency, intensity, or spatial extent of droughts reconstructed by proxies, that implies that neither exotic forcings nor climate variability outside the tropical Pacific are required to produce widespread megadroughts in this region. If prolonged departures from the mean are indeed emergent but unremarkable features of western North America’s hydroclimate, we might be able to estimate their future occurrence as a linear combination of changes in the mean state and the linear dynamics that have governed their behavior in the past. S. St. George, T. Ault, C. Carrillo, S. Coats, J. Mankin, J. Smerdon, What to expect when you’re expecting decadal variability in hydroclimatic proxies, PAGES 5th Open Science Meeting, Zaragoza, Spain, May 9-13, 2017.

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The ability to deliver effective and engaging oral presentations is a critical skill for all researchers. Unfortunately, despite the importance of clear communication, too many scientific presentations at conferences and workshops are confusing, abstract, and boring. In this short workshop, participants learn several key strategies and tips that will make their professional presentations just a little bit better than the rest. We discuss strategies for presentation planning, show how basic design principles can create more memorable slides, and point towards an outstanding set online tools and resources. Become a presentation superstar! Scott St. George is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota and a Resident Fellow at UMN's Institute on the Environment. Prior to joining the faculty at Minnesota, he was a research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada. Scott shares some of his experiences ‘doing presentations differently’ at conferences, outreach opportunities, and the classroom.

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In many settings, trees growing on floodplains provide an important source of indirect evidence that may be used to infer the occurrence, extent, and magnitude of floods prior to direct observations. That evidence may take several forms, including external scars caused by abrasion or impact from floating debris, anatomical changes within the annual growth increment following prolonged stem or root inundation, or tilting or uprooting due to the hydraulic pressure of floodwaters. Likely the most useful characteristic of paleoflood studies based on floodplain trees is their relatively high temporal resolution and dating accuracy compared to most other methods. Dendrochronological methods can routinely date past floods to the year of their occurrence and, in rare cases, can estimate the timing of floods that occur during the growing season to within two weeks. This high degree of chronological control, which is surpassed only by that provided by direct observation or instrumentation, can be used to determine whether floods in separate watersheds were synchronous or offset by several years and test hypotheses that suppose linkages between extreme floods and specific forcing mechanisms. Furthermore, the wide geographic distribution of tree species with dateable rings combined with the broad suite of methods available to examine interconnections between floods and tree growth allow this style of paleoflood hydrology to be applied to many settings that are not suitable for techniques that depend on geological evidence. Future paleoflood research involving tree rings will need to strike a balance between improving our understanding of the biological and fluvial processes that link tree growth to past events, and providing answers to questions about flood dynamics and hazards that are needed to safeguard people and property from future floods.

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Nearly all decisions about water in Minnesota relate either directly or indirectly to data collected by the state’s hydrological observing network. Because most gauges were installed in early 20th century, as a whole the network provides us with roughly a 100-year ‘window’ to estimate flood risks, develop worst-case scenarios for drought, and set maximum allowable withdrawals for aquifers. But when we rely exclusively on observations made during this relatively brief interval, we may inadvertently increase our exposure to hydrological ‘surprises’. In order to make sound decisions about water in Minnesota, we need to expand this window: into the past, drawing upon historical accounts and natural archives; and into the future, via projections from climate and hydrological models. By cultivating a broader perspective on hydrological variability and extremes across the state, we will be better prepared to ensure adequate water supplies and mitigate the impacts of future floods and droughts.

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These visuals were prepared to support a string quartet performance and panel on climate change at Northwestern University in February 2106. A well-designed graphic can help audiences to quickly understand the main message embedded within a complex set of climate data and to retain those ideas longer than they would have if they were conveyed by words alone. But the visual aids used regularly by climate scientists also have their limitations: they are most easily understood by people who are already fluent in technical illustrations; they're usually static and sometimes do not tell an obvious story; and for many, they don't elicit a strong emotional response. Music, by contrast, is inherently narrative and is known to exert a powerful influence on human emotions. Because of this, sonification — the transformation of data into acoustic signals — may have considerable promise as a tool to enhance the communication of climate science. Daniel Crawford and Scott St. George report on a collaboration between scientists and artists that uses music to transmit the evidence of climate change in an engaging and visceral way.

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Measurements of tree-ring widths are the most widely-distributed and best replicated source of surrogate environmental information on the planet, and are one of the main archives used to estimate changes in regional and global climate during the past several centuries or millennia. Because the Northern Hemisphere ring-width network is now so large, it is more crucial than ever to ensure our understanding of tree-environment relations is not influenced by decisions to include or exclude certain records. It may be the case that a particular set of ring-width records are, for whatever reason, more tightly coupled to a particular climate factor than other records from the same region or species and, as a result, may be superior estimators of that factor’s past behavior. At the same time, it is known that selecting a small number of predictors from a large pool of potential candidates increases the likelihood of a Type I error. That effect may be particularly relevant to dendroclimatology because the total number of available ring-width records is often much larger than the number of records used to produce reconstructions of large-scale climate features. As an initial step, it would be helpful if paleoclimate reconstructions derived from tree rings described more explicitly the criteria used to select ring-width records as potential predictors and specified those records excluded by that screening. By comparing ring-width chronologies and their relations with climate against the standard set by thousands of records across the hemisphere, we should be better able to distinguish climate signals from proxy noise and produce more accurate reconstructions of climate during the late Holocene.

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When climate science is communicated to the broader public, many of its key findings are shared in the form of conceptual diagrams or information-dense data graphics. In this collaboration, we applied a data sonification approach to express NASA’s global temperature record as a musical composition for the cello. The resulting piece, which we titled ‘A Song of Our Warming Planet’, transformed 133 years of annual global temperature anomalies into a haunting, atonal melody that stretched across almost all of the instrument’s range. Since its release in June 2013, the song has been featured by several national and international media outlets, including the New York Times, the Weather Channel, and National Public Radio, and its accompanying video has received more than 140,000 views from nearly every corner of the world. We are currently preparing a new composition for string quartet that will add a geographic dimension to describe both the pace and place of global warming. We believe the success of our initial sonification project is testament to the power of music to reach audiences who respond less enthusiastically to traditional methods used to communicate climate science. We also imagine this approach could be applied more broadly to allow students to create novel, visceral, and memorable encounters with other aspects of the geophysical sciences.

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GEOG3839.14, The West, water and the Colorado River

1. SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECONSTRUCTIONS FOR T H E LAS T 2 , 00 0 Y E A R S NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES

4. Photograph: Nevada Tourism Media Relations

5. Tucson

6. Photograph: Chazz Lane Central Arizona Project

9. Photograph: Ben Amstutz

10. Photograph: Ben Amstutz

11. Photograph: Michael Koukoullis

12. Water transfers in the American southwest Courtesy Glen MacDonald

13. Colorado River Compact 1922

14. Average river ﬂow, 1906 to 1922 18 MAF

15. allocated to 7 basin states 15 MAF Average river ﬂow, 1906 to 1922 18 MAF

16. allocated to Mexico 1½ MAF allocated to 7 basin states 15 MAF Average river ﬂow, 1906 to 1922 18 MAF

17.

18. Observed discharge, Colorado River Compact allocation (16.5 MAF)

19. Observed discharge, Colorado River Compact allocation (16.5 MAF)

20. Average river ﬂow, 1906 to 2005 15 MAF

21. Average river ﬂow, 1906 to 2005 15 MAF

22. UNITED STATES MEXICO Arizona Sonora California Baja California Colorado New Mexico Nevada Utah Wyoming

23. Low reservoir Photograph: Glen MacDonald

24.

25. T H E W E S T, WA T E R A N D T H E C O L O R A D O R I V E R

26.

27. Tree-ring display at elementary school Photograph:Tom Swetnam

28.

29. The history of precipitation and runoﬀ in the Colorado Basin as indicated by tree-rings Edmund Shulman Ph.D. Thesis Harvard University 1944

30.

31.

32.

33. water stress narrow ring reduced photosynthesis less cell expansion reduced cell division

34. INDIRECT RELATION

35.

36.

37. Source: Woodhouse et al., 2006

38. 100% EXPLAINED VARIANCE St. George and Luckman JJA temperature 0%

39. 100% EXPLAINED VARIANCE Woodhouse et al. Annual discharge St. George and Luckman JJA temperature 0%

40. stream gauge tree-ring estimate Source: Woodhouse et al., 2006

41. Source: Woodhouse et al., 2006

42. MEGADROUGHT intensity at least equivalent to modern multiyear droughts duration longer than the several years to decade thereof Seager et al., Journal of Climate, 2008

43. “ Average reconstructed annual ﬂow for the period 1844–1848 was lower ” than the observed ﬂow for 1999–2004. Woodhouse et al., 2006

44. “ The long-term perspective provided by tree ring reconstructions points to looming conﬂict between water demand and supply ” in the upper Colorado River basin. Woodhouse et al., 2006

45. Dave Meko University of Arizona

46. Source: Woodhouse et al., 2006

47. Relic tree, circa 323 BC Harmon Canyon, Utah

48. 1,200 years of Colorado River discharge Meko et al., GRL, 2007

49. “ The tree-ring record shows that droughts lasting decades have routinely gripped ” western North America. Jonathan Overpeck and Bradley Udall

50. “ As western North America currently endures its worst drought since 1900, it is important to realize that this drought might be nothing compared to what is possible in the future if megadrought and ” even ho er temperatures coincide. Jonathan Overpeck and Bradley Udall

51.

52. Tree rings provided the central evidence that caused municipal water agencies to “RETHINK OLD ASSUMPTIONS” about worst-case scenarios for reservoir operations and re-evaluate the potential duration and geographic scope of severe drought.

53. READING FOR THURSDAY David Meko and Connie Woodhouse (2010), Application of streamﬂow reconstruction to water resources management. M.K. Hughes et al. (eds.), Dendroclimatology, Developments in Paleoenvironmental Research.

54. Please read the complete paper (eventually).

55. FOR NEXT CLASS Read sections 8.3.3 and 8.3.4

56. MID-TERM EXAM

57.

58. “ They all laughed at me... but I'LL SHOW THEM! I'LL SHOW THEM ALL!! ” BWAHAHAHAAA!

59. PLEASE WAIT at least one day before asking questions about your exam.

60. QUESTION 4 A common misconception is that dendrochronology involves just counting tree rings. Describe three situations that would lead simple ring counting to provide an inaccurate estimate of tree age.

61.

62. LAB UPDATE

63. Photograph: Calvin Farris

64. Photograph: Lane Johnston