Unprecedented Drought Challenges for Texas Water Resources in a Changing Climate: What Do Researchers and Stakeholders Need to Know? uri icon

abstract

  • AbstractLongrange water planning is complicated by factors that are rapidly changing in the 21st century, including climate, population, and water use. Here, we analyze climate factors and drought projections for Texas as an example of a diverse society straddling an aridity gradient to examine how the projections can best serve water stakeholder needs. We find that climate models are robust in projecting drying of summerseason soil moisture and decreasing reservoir supplies for both the eastern and western portions of Texas during the 21st century. Further, projections indicate drier conditions during the latter half of the 21st century than even the most arid centuries of the last 1,000years that included megadroughts. To illustrate how accounting for drought nonstationarity may increase water resiliency, we consider generalized case studies involving four key stakeholder groups: agricultural producers, large surface water suppliers, small groundwater management districts, and regional water planning districts. We also examine an example of customized climate information being used as input to longrange water planning. We find that while stakeholders value the quantitative capability of climate model outputs, more specific climaterelated information better supports resilience planning across multiple stakeholder groups. New suites of tools could provide necessary capacity for both short and longterm, stakeholderspecific adaptive planning.

published proceedings

  • EARTHS FUTURE

altmetric score

  • 284.59

author list (cited authors)

  • Nielsen-Gammon, J. W., Banner, J. L., Cook, B. I., Tremaine, D. M., Wong, C. I., Mace, R. E., ... Kloesel, K.

citation count

  • 44

complete list of authors

  • Nielsen-Gammon, John W||Banner, Jay L||Cook, Benjamin I||Tremaine, Darrel M||Wong, Corinne I||Mace, Robert E||Gao, Huilin||Yang, Zong-Liang||Gonzalez, Marisa Flores||Hoffpauir, Richard||Gooch, Tom||Kloesel, Kevin

publication date

  • August 2020