Observations show snowpack has declined across much of the western United States over the period 1950–99. This reduction has important social and economic implications, as water retained in the snowpack from winter storms ...

Four dynamic regional climate models (RCMs) and one statistical downscaling approach were used to downscale 10 years of historical climate in California. To isolate possible limitations of the downscaling methods, we ...

California’s mountainous topography, exposure to occasional heavily moisture-laden storm systems, and varied communities and infrastructures in low lying areas make it highly vulnerable to floods. An important question ...

It is often remarked that most of the western US (Figure 1) is “always in drought,” especially by visitors from wetter climates. The plants and landforms of the West, however, are more or less adapted to the region’s ...

Three statistical downscaling methods were applied to NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (used as a surrogate for the best possible general circulation model), and the downscaled meteorology was used to drive a hydrologic model over ...

Large changes in the hydrology of the western United States have been observed since the mid-twentieth century. These include a reduction in the amount of precipitation arriving as snow, a decline in snowpack at low and ...

Observations have shown that the hydrological cycle of the western United States changed significantly over the last half of the 20th century. We present a regional, multivariable climate change detection and attribution ...

The variability (1990–2002) of potential evapotranspiration estimates (ETo) and related meteorological variables from a set of stations from the California Irrigation Management System (CIMIS) is studied. Data from the ...

Floods have been a recurring theme in California’s climatology, hydrology, and politics throughout its history. Today, California's aging water supply and flood protection infrastructures are challenged by major floods ...

This article applies formal detection and attribution techniques to investigate the nature of observed shifts in the timing of streamflow in the western United States. Previous studies have shown that the snow hydrology ...