Title: Modeling stream temperature in the Anthropocene: An earth system modeling approach

Abstract

A new large-scale stream temperature model has been developed within the Community Earth System Model (CESM) framework. The model is coupled with the Model for Scale Adaptive River Transport (MOSART) that represents river routing and a water management model (WM) that represents the effects of reservoir operations and water withdrawals on flow regulation. The coupled models allow the impacts of reservoir operations and withdrawals on stream temperature to be explicitly represented in a physically based and consistent way. The models have been applied to the Contiguous United States driven by observed meteorological forcing. It is shown that the model is capable of reproducing stream temperature spatiotemporal variation satisfactorily by comparison against the observed streamflow from over 320 USGS stations. Including water management in the models improves the agreement between the simulated and observed streamflow at a large number of stream gauge stations. Both climate and water management are found to have important influence on the spatiotemporal patterns of stream temperature. More interestingly, it is quantitatively estimated that reservoir operation could cool down stream temperature in the summer low-flow season (August – October) by as much as 1~2oC over many places, as water management generally mitigates low flow, which has importantmore » implications to aquatic ecosystems. In conclusion, sensitivity of the simulated stream temperature to input data and reservoir operation rules used in the WM model motivates future directions to address some limitations in the current modeling framework.« less

Authors:

Li, Hong -Yi ^[1]; Leung, L. Ruby ^[1]; Tesfa, Teklu ^[1]; Voisin, Nathalie ^[1]; Hejazi, Mohamad ^[1]; Liu, Lu ^[2]; Liu, Ying ^[1]; Rice, Jennie ^[1]; Wu, Huan ^[3]; Yang, Xiaofan ^[1]

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+ Show Author Affiliations

1. Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
2. Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
3. Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States); NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States)

Publication Date:

Thu Oct 29 00:00:00 EDT 2015

Research Org.:

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE

OSTI Identifier:

1243251

Report Number(s):

PNNL-SA-109347
Journal ID: ISSN 1942-2466; KP1703030

Grant/Contract Number:  

AC05-76RL01830

Resource Type:

Accepted Manuscript

Journal Name:

Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Volume: 7; Journal Issue: 4; Journal ID: ISSN 1942-2466

Publisher:

American Geophysical Union (AGU)

Country of Publication:

United States

Language:

English

Subject:

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; stream temperature; earth system model; water management