Abstract
Long-term snowpack decline is among the best-understood impacts of climate change on water resources systems. This trend has been observed for decades and is projected to continue even in climate projections in which total runoff volumes do not change significantly. For basins in which snowpack has historically provided intra-annual water storage, snowpack decline creates several issues that may require adaptation to infrastructure, operations, or both. This study develops an approach to analyze vulnerabilities and adaptations specifically focused on the challenge of snowpack decline, using the northern California reservoir system as a case study. We first introduce an open-source daily time-step simulation model of this system, which is validated against historical observations of operations. Multiobjective vulnerabilities to snowpack decline are then examined using a set of downscaled climate scenarios to capture the physically based effects of rising temperatures. A statistical analysis shows that the primary impacts include water supply shortage and lower reservoir storage resulting from the seasonal shift in runoff timing. These challenges identified from the vulnerability assessment inform proposed adaptations to operations to maintain multiobjective performance across the ensemble of plausible future scenarios, which include other uncertain hydrologic changes. To adapt seasonal reservoir management without the cost of additional infrastructure, we specifically propose and test adaptations that parameterize the structure of existing operating policies: a dynamic flood control rule curve and revised snowpack-to-streamflow forecasting methods to improve seasonal runoff predictability given declining snowpack. These adaptations are shown to mitigate the majority of vulnerabilities caused by snowpack decline across the scenario ensemble, with remaining opportunities for improvement using formal policy search and dynamic adaptation techniques. The coupled approach to vulnerability assessment and adaptation is generalizable to other snowmelt-dominated water resources systems facing the loss of seasonal storage due to rising temperatures.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available in a repository online in accordance with funder data retention policies.
ORCA CMIP5 inputs: URL: https://github.com/jscohen4/orca_cmip5_inputs
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation Grant and CBET-1803589 INFEWS Grant CNS-1639268 and NST Grant CBET-1803589. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the NSF. We further acknowledge the World Climate Research Program’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling and the climate modeling groups listed in the supplement of this paper for producing and making available their model output.
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Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 146 • Issue 12 • December 2020
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© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Feb 25, 2020
Accepted: Jun 22, 2020
Published online: Sep 27, 2020
Published in print: Dec 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Feb 27, 2021
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