Drought, Tree Rings and Water Resource Management in Colorado

Linking drought research to water resource management actions

A multivariate, principal-component based index has been developed to quantify the severity of droughts. Named the Aggregate Drought Index (ADI), it describes the meteorological, hydrological, and agricultural aspects of drought on a climate-divisional basis, using fluctuations in the values of five variables associated with the hydrologic cycle and available water: precipitation, evaporation, ...

Investment Methods in Sustainable Water Resource Management Using SAW Method

Tree-ring footprint of joint hydrologic drought in Sacramento and Upper Colorado river basins, western USA

Growing and changing demands on water supply, along with natural climate variability and possible anthropogenically induced climate change, make water resource management and planning increasingly challenging, particularly in arid regions. Instrumental climate and gaged streamflow records provide just a snapshop of recent natural hydrologic variability. In this paper, we use tree-ring-based ann...

Declaring Drought for Effective Water Management

Water managers are tasked with resolving conflicts between freshwater resource uses, which range from municipal water supply, to recreation, and to sustaining aquatic ecosystem integrity. Further complicating management, hydrologic processes experience numerous sources of periodic, quasi-periodic, and episodic variation. Water allocation trade offs are often most complex and contentious when av...

Growth cessation uncouples isotopic signals in leaves and tree rings of drought-exposed oak trees.

An increase in temperature along with a decrease in summer precipitation in Central Europe will result in an increased frequency of drought events and gradually lead to a change in species composition in forest ecosystems. In the present study, young oaks (Quercus robur L. and Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl.) were transplanted into large mesocosms and exposed for 3 years to experimental warming ...