Nebraska Water Center: Recent Episodes
None
The Drought of 2012 was a multi-billion dollar agricultural disaster in the United States. This year’s drought was on par with the drought of 1988, which—according to the National Climatic Data Center—caused $77.6 billion (based on the 2012 Consumer Price Index cost-adjusted value) in mostly agricultural losses. Historically, the U.S. drought of 2012 attained similar areal coverage as the U.S. drought of the 1950s, although the 1950s drought was marked by multiple years of extreme heat and precipitation shortfalls in parts of the country.
Among row crops, 2012 losses were most substantial for grain corn (maize). Pre-drought estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) indicated an expected U.S. corn yield of 166.0 bushels per acre and production of 14.79 billion bushels. By January 2013, those estimates had dropped to 123.4 bushels per acre and 10.80 billion bushels—reductions of 26 and 27 percent, respectively. Another U.S. agricultural sector adversely affected by the drought of 2012 was the livestock industry. According to analysis by USDA, more than three-quarters (76 percent) of the domestic cattle inventory was located in drought at the height of the 2012 drought. USDA also reported that U.S. rangeland and pastures were rated 59 percent in very poor to poor condition for five consecutive weeks in August-September 2012—the highest such percentage ever recorded.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Groundwater Resources Program is conducting an assessment of groundwater availability to gain a clearer understanding of the status of the Nation’s groundwater resources and the natural and human factors that can affect those resources. Additional goals are to better estimate availability and suitability of those resources in the future for various uses. The High Plains aquifer is a nationally important water resource that underlies about 174,000 square miles in parts of eight western states. The aquifer serves as a primary source of drinking water for approximately 2.3 million people and also sustains more than one quarter of the Nation’s agricultural production. In 2000, total water withdrawals of 17.5 billion gallons per day from the aquifer accounted for 20 percent of all groundwater withdrawn in the United States, making it the most intensively pumped aquifer in the Nation. In the Central and Southern High Plains, the aquifer historically had less saturated thickness, and current resource management issues are focused on the availability of water, and reduced ability to irrigate as water levels and well productivity have declined. In contrast, the Northern High Plains aquifer includes the thickest part of the aquifer and a larger saturated thickness than the other parts of the aquifer, and current water resource management issues are related to the interaction of groundwater with surface water and resource management triggered primarily by the availability of surface water. The presentation will cover major components of the High Plains Groundwater Availability Study, including estimating water budget components for the entire High Plains aquifer, building a refined groundwater model for the Northern High Plains aquifer, and using that model to better understand surface- and groundwater interaction and characterize water availability.
Current consent decree settlements for violations of the Clean Water Act (1972) increasingly include provisions for redress of combined sewer overflow activity through hybrid approaches that incorporate the best of both gray (high-rate treatment plants, storage tunnels, etc.) and green infrastructure techniques (e.g., rain gardens, rain barrels, pervious pavement systems). Adaptive management is an environmental management strategy that uses an iterative process of decision-making to reduce the uncertainty in environmental management via system monitoring. A central tenet of adaptive management is that management involves a learning process that can help regulated communities achieve environmental quality objectives. We are using an adaptive management approach to guide a green infrastructure retrofit of a neighborhood block located in the Slavic Village Development Corporation area (Cleveland, Ohio). We are in the process of gathering hydrologic and ecosystem services data on two neighborhood blocks (control and treatment). We will then use this data as a basis for collaboration with area citizens on a plan to use green infrastructure to contain stormflows on the treatment block. Monitoring data will provide researchers with feedback on the impact of green infrastructure implementation and suggest where improvements can be made.
Starting in the late 1970s, warming in the Southwest has produced fewer cool season freezes, losses in regional snowpack, earlier spring flowering and leafout, and hotter summers, all of which should affect vegetation differently across the region’s diverse climatic and biotic zones. Another potential impact of the ongoing regional warming is changes in how recent and future droughts affect vegetation. One way to examine the effects of drought and a warming climate on vegetation is to compare climatic controls on photosynthesis and transpiration during the major regional droughts of the 1950s and 2000s, periods of unusually dry conditions before and during the recent decades of warming. Here, we examine indices that represent climatic constraints on foliar growth for both drought periods and evaluate these indices for areas that experienced tree mortality during the 2000s drought. Relative to the 1950s drought, warmer conditions during the 2000s drought brought about fewer occurrences of temperatures too low for foliar growth at lower elevations in winter and higher elevations in summer, as well as higher vapor pressure deficits that were more limiting from spring through summer at lower and middle elevations. At many locations where tree mortality occurred during the 2000s drought, low-temperature constraints on foliar growth were extremely unlimiting, whereas vapor pressure deficit constraints were extremely limiting from early spring through late autumn. In addition to discussing how these results demonstrate the importance of seasonality and elevational gradients for understanding the effects of drought and warming on vegetation in topographically complex regions like the Southwest, we also explore how projected changes in future regional climate may potentially further or alter these effects.
The partnership between the university community and NCAR has given society a suite of very powerful scientific observational, global & regional modelling and data analysis tools. At the same time, climate change science is rapidly transitioning away from Climate 1.0, classic climate modelling showing that anthropogenic warming is occurring, to Climate 2.0 where the primary question is "How do we mitigate or adapt to this change and its impact on the coupled human & natural system?" The Climate 2.0 question requires a much more advanced approach to address the complex and interlinked social and physical science elements of this question. This talk will highlight a number of domestic and international projects where NCAR's Climate Science and Applications Program is working with its university collaborators to effectively integrate social and physical sciences in addressing societally relevant climate adaptation questions such as future water availability, food security, energy, urban systems and human health.
Hydrological landscapes consist of both surface- and groundwaters, interacting across several spatial and temporal scales. These interactions underpin a host of ecosystem services including transformation of nutrients and pollutants, buffering in-stream temperatures, and providing a unique habitat within aquatic ecosystems. The transport of water and the solutes it carries through hydrological landscapes is central to quantifying these ecosystem services, yet our ability to predict these fluxes remains particularly limited during dynamic changes in hydrological landscapes. Here, I present two case studies focused on stream solute transport during dynamic periods in hydrological landscapes. First, geophysical tools are used to image and quantify solute transport in the hyporheic zone (near-stream aquifer) during baseflow recession. Next, a series of experiments conducted during a major storm event are analyzed to quantify stream gains and losses throughout a highly dynamic 9-day period. Results of these studies demonstrate a balance between hydrological and geological controls on transport through hydrological landscapes, and the nested scales at which exchanged of water, solutes, and energy occur.
Non-native species are moving freely around the world with human commerce, causing large ecological changes and economic damages. I will describe the effects of one such non-native species, the zebra mussel, on the Hudson River ecosystem. Zebra mussels appeared in the Hudson in 1991, and by the end of 1992 outweighed all other consumers in the ecosystem. This enormous population changed nearly every characteristic of the Hudson River ecosystem: plankton fell by 80%, populations of native shellfish and other animals that depended on plankton declined or disappeared, water chemistry and clarity changed, all of which led to large shifts in the growth rates, geographic distribution, and population size of fishes. In recent years, the zebra mussel population and its effects have been changing, suggesting that the initial effects of the invasion are not permanent.
As a Nation, we’ve spent lots of money over the years trying to clean up our rivers and lakes. Has it been worth it? How do we know if we’ve under- or over-spent? This seminar presentation explores this question empirically in a mid-west (Minnesota) agricultural watershed, using a newly developed analytic tool (InVEST, from the Natural Capital Project by the University of Minnesota and others) that permits us to think about the extent to which water quality investments are, or are not, rationally supported by Science.
Over the past two decades there has been vigorous development in the satellite assets and the algorithms necessary to estimate precipitation around the globe. In particular the highly successful joint NASA/JAXA Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and the upcoming Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, also joint between NASA and JAXA, have driven these issues. At the same time, the long-running Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) continues to extend a stable, climate-oriented view of global precipitation. This talk will provide an overview of these projects, sketch plans for next-generation products, and provide some examples of the best use for the different products. You will see that it takes a range of data sets to address the variety of issues that need precipitation data, including detailed 3-D views of hurricanes, flash flood forecasting, drought analysis, and global change.
Social participation in water governance has recently become a reality in many economies and societies. Characterized by the direct involvement of an array of people in decision-making and implementation of water policy or management, at a minimum, social participation involves individuals and/or collectives having an opportunity to express their voices and articulate their arguments in public forums.Understanding the growing interest in participatory or collaborative water management involves uncovering larger political, economic, and cultural trends of recent decades which frame participatory actions. This presentation draws upon severalcases from around the world by a group of scholars and practitioners that I have worked with in examining participation as it relates to water rights definition, hydropower dam construction, urban river renewal, irrigation organizations, water development, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), river basin management, water policy implementation and judicial decision-making in water conflicts. Yet there are commonalities in participatory experiences across this broad spectrum of water issues. Calls for inclusion and social participation have not disappeared and are unlikely to, particularly for those engaged with democratization as social participation continues to be connected with the goals of rectifying social inequities, responding appropriately to environmental disturbances, and transforming structures of power. Attempts to level the terrain of social equity through participatory water governance remain appealing largely because genuine participation of the disenfranchised in water management may build bases of power and change networks of social equity. Yet the constraints to genuine broad-based social participation are undeniable. As translating social demands and coping with public interests within water management have become a reality in many parts of the globe during recent decades, many challenges have cropped up. This presentation considers dimensions in which power regulation, social equity, and democracy-building are connected with social participation that are only beginning to be analysed for the water sector.
The Niobrara River traverses approximately 535 river miles from its headwaters in Wyoming to the confluence with the Missouri River, while its basin covers 12,600 square miles of northern Nebraska. There are varied water demands within the Niobrara River Basin, ranging from agriculture, hydropower, recreation, and wildlife. Balancing the water supplies of the basin, with the varied nature, location, and timing of the needs for that water lends to management challenges and opportunities. The Nebraska Department of Natural Resources (NDNR) is undertaking the Niobrara River Basin Study. This study consists of various modeling tools to both determine the available surface-groundwater basin supplies and identify potential effects of various conjunctive water management options through uncertain future climate/water supply variability. The modeling approach NDNR utilizes is unique, as it integrates a soil-moisture balance model, a groundwater model, and surface water operations model. NDNR is currently utilizing this approach in several river basins. Under the Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART program, the Niobrara River Basin Study also includes a climate model component. The climate model outputs will provide a series of potential future water supply (precipitation) scenarios to evaluate the effectiveness of various potential water management strategies.
Proper management of water resources is becoming increasingly important, in part due to climate variability, especially in the American Midwest where significant irrigation has already depleted available water sources. Projected changes in precipitation and temperature will increase the stress on water resources in the Midwest, as it is anticipated to increase irrigation demand. In order to help guide future water management decisions integrated hydrologic models have been employed to predict groundwater and surface water conditions under future scenarios, including climate variability and water use changes. The use of reservoirs, irrigation canals and other operational structures can pose difficulties in properly simulating both the natural hydrologic environment and the man made water operations. This presentation will focus on the continuing development of a coupled integrated hydrologic/surface water operations model. This model will allow water management decisions such as the timing and magnitude of reservoir releases and the management of irrigation canals to be accurately captured with a physically-based representation of the surface water and groundwater flow systems. This model is being developed as part of a large multi-state research study to evaluate alternatives to optimize surface and groundwater use in the Lower Republican River Basin.
Dr. James (Jay) Famiglietti is a part of the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling in the Department of Earth System Science and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. He spoke at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on Sept. 14, 2012.