Flavio Lehner, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, is working to reduce that uncertainty, by improving the climate models on which future water projections are based. Lehner won a three-year, $500,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to do that work, beginning this fall.
Dan Barrie, a program manager in NOAA’s Climate Program Office, said Lehner’s work will improve NOAA’s climate models and enable the agency to make better short-term predictions of floods and droughts and better long-term projections of how surface water systems will evolve in the 21st century.
“The United States is experiencing profound changes in its regional water resources,” Barrie said. “It is more urgent than ever to have the best modeling tools to provide a vision of these future changes so that we can take cost-effective measures now to mitigate and adapt to them.”
Lehner’s research, which will improve climate modeling globally, was based on similar research he began in the Colorado River. Current estimates predict that for every degree Celsius of global warming, the Colorado River will lose between 3 to 15% of its streamflow.
Lehner compared the differences in climate models to the disparity in human reactions to COVID-19 – assessing whether an individual has COVID-19 is relatively simple, but predicting how sick the virus will make each person is much more difficult. A similar principle is at play in climate modeling, he said.