Project abstract summaryproject title: detailed soil moisture projections for scenario planning and ecological drought assessmentproject dates: 3 1 2024 through 2 29 2028AWARD purpose: ecological…

The University of Colorado received a $888,273 Cooperative Agreement award from the U.S. Geological Survey under the National and Regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CFDA 15.820) program. The project will develop and deliver detailed quantitative projections of 21st century water balance, water availability, and ecological drought metrics across the contiguous United States. This will be accomplished through ecosystem water balance modeling with a daily time step and multiple soil layers, providing information to support scenario planning, climate adaptation frameworks, and habitat vulnerability assessments. A key deliverable is gridded datasets of the modeled water balance and soil moisture metrics that will be made publicly available through the Climate Toolbox website. The University of Colorado will subaward a portion of the work to Northern Arizona University to complete the water balance simulations and drought metric calculations, as well as lead publication of the project's modeling approach and findings.

Activities

This project develop and deliver quantitative 21ST century projections of water balance, water availability, and ecological drought metrics across the coterminous U.S. This project will utilize an ecosystem water balance model with a daily time step and multiple soil layers, allowing output to represent rapid changes in particular soil layers. The project will generate publication describing the modeling approach and datasets, conduct outreach activities to increase awareness and utilization of the new datasets, and ensure that the data are available to the public via the web.deliverables and expected outcomes: this project will generate two primary science products. The first is gridded datasets of metrics that quantify water balance and soil moisture for each CMIP5 model in the MACAV2-metdata downscaled climate projections dataset. These data will be made available to resource managers, scientists and the general public on the climate toolbox and USGS data portal. The second is a manuscript that describes the water balance model, providing users of the data with detailed information about the processes and logic utilized by the model.intended beneficiary(IES): data provided by this project will be useful for a wide variety of applications including scenario planning, climate adaptation frameworks, species distribution models, and habitat vulnerability assessments. Products will include all the detailed data (e.g. daily, multiple soil layers, many water balance components), enabling sophisticated users to examine specific conditions that they know are relevant for their ecosystems and location.

Subrecipient activities

The university of colorado will subaward to northern arizona university to complete the water balance simulations, calculate ecological drought metrics, and lead the publications and outreach documents. University of california merced will be responsible for hosting the resulting datasets on the climate toolbox website.