Past Projects

Assessing Vulnerability and Adaptive Management Under Climate Change Scenarios: Lessons from California’s Largest Reservoir

With the arrival of increasing droughts and floods, declining snowpacks, increasing temperatures, and increasing evapotranspiration, the ways in which the West has managed water for the past 75 years increasingly appear to be insufficient in sustaining projected demand. However, individual river basins, watersheds, and reservoir drainage areas will not be impacted uniformly. As a result, the potential impacts of climate change on water management and any associated mitigation or adaptation strategies must be examined on a case-by-case basis.

The primary objective of this work is to investigate the impacts of climate change on rule-curve based reservoir operations for low-elevation historically rain-and-snow driven basins by using the Shasta reservoir in the Trinity Alps of northwestern California as a case study.

Project Lead: Mike Sierks

Collaborators: Mike Dettinger, Will Chapman, Marty Ralph