Decadal Climate Variability and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Water Management
Funded by:
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers–Institute for Water Resources; October 2016 – May 2017
Principal Investigator:
Vikram Mehta, CRCES
Research Associate:
Katherin Mendoza, CRCES
Co-Investigators:
J. Rolf Olsen, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – Institute for Water Resources
Harvey Hill, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – Institute for Water Resources
Proposal Summary
The overall objective of the project is to write a report that provides the latest scientific information on decadal climate variability (DCV) and the potential impacts on water management in the coterminous United States. The CRCES personnel will also work with personnel at the Institute for Water Resources (IWR) to evaluate how this information could be used by USACE water managers. The work consists of three tasks. The first task will be a meeting at the Institute for Water Resources to review the project framework and discuss the potential use of DCV information by USACE water managers. The second task will extend results from the previous contract (Project I) to further evaluate the persistence of climate states and the probabilities of shifting to different states. The task will also extend the earlier work by looking at river basins in the coterminous United States in addition to the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. The third task is to produce a report that includes the following topics: 1) basic explanation of DCV; 2) description of DCV indices including their relationship to one another; 3) explanation of connections between oceans and hydrology in the contiguous U.S.; 4) discussion on the predictability of decadal climate processes; 5) discussion on persistence of climate states and on the probabilities of transitioning from one combination of climate states to another.