Colorado Climate Preparedness Project

This Western Water Assessment-funded project will address the state of Colorado’s progress toward the Governor’s goal of preparing the state to adapt to unavoidable climate change. The primary purpose is to set the stage for the next governor to continue to plan for climate variability and change by providing a catalog of climate vulnerabilities and current activities, personnel, products, and projects from Colorado and other entities along with policy relevant, but not prescriptive, suggestions for future actions. Read more ...

Decision Models

The Farm Adapt Model simulates yield, costs, and outputs of a 2,000 acre dryland wheat farm on the U.S. Great Plains, with the goal of modeling the impacts of climate variation, especially extreme events and rapid climate change, and farmer adaptation. Climate change is input via off-sets to the mean of the yield distribution from which the farm draws each year in a 30 year simulation. Read more ...

Drought Vulnerability Indicators Project

This Western Water Assessment-funded project, “A Drought Impact and Vulnerability Indicator Suite” led by Center director Bill Travis with research assistant Kristin Gangwer, has spent the past year creating a set of indicators for assessing the impacts of drought across different sectors (urban, agricultural, water, recreation), with the goal of developing both research-quality time series that can be normalized and analyzed for trends, and applied indicators that can help managers assess impacts and changing vulnerabilities. Read more ...

Interactions of Drought and Climate Adaptation (IDCA) for Urban Water

This new project, which was recently funded by the NOAA Sectoral Applications Research Program (SARP), will examine how drought policies interact with both short-term drought and long-term climate change. It will ask whether adjustment today or in the past lead to more resilient systems across climate time scales. The project researchers hypothesize that the more effective a policy becomes in terms of increasing water use efficiency, the more reliant the system becomes on accurate information. Read more ...