Analytic framework tool for predicting sensitivity of reduced summer streamflow to climate warming across the Pacific Northwest

Description

Summer streamflows in the Pacific Northwest come mainly from snowmelt and ground-water discharge. As the climate warms, reduced snowpack and earlier snowmelt will cause reductions in summer streamflow, which can complicate forest management, particularly for watershed restoration activities.

This tool provides an analytic framework for identifying watersheds that are most and least vulnerable to reduced summer streamflow. Many assessments of climate change impacts on streamflow rely on coarse temperature and precipitation projections, but this framework captures smaller scale topographic controls in a spatially explicit fashion that incorporates ground-water processes. From this analysis, researchers were able to develop detailed “wall-to-wall” maps of low flow sensitivity for Oregon and Washington landscapes that provide a robust, practical, and scalable approach for assessing risk to water resources at the landscape scale.