Contribution of environmental forcings to US runoff changes for the period 1950–2010

Forbes, Whitney L.; Mao, Jiafu; Jin, Mingzhou; Kao, Shih-Chieh; Fu, Wenting; Shi, Xiaoying; Riccuito, Daniel M.; Thornton, Peter E.; Ribes, Aurelien; Wang, Yutao; Piao, Shilong; Zhao, Tianbao; Schwalm, Christopher R.; Hoffman, Forrest M.; Fisher, Joshua B.; Ito, Akihiko; Poulter, Ben; Fang, Yuanyuan; Tian, Hanqin; Jain, Atul K.; Hayes, Daniel J.

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aabb41

Title: Contribution of environmental forcings to US runoff changes for the period 1950–2010

Journal Article · Fri May 04 00:00:00 EDT 2018 · Environmental Research Letters

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aabb41· OSTI ID:1437884

Forbes, Whitney L. ^[1];

^[2]; Jin, Mingzhou ^[3];

^[2]; Fu, Wenting ^[4];

^[2];

^[2]; Ribes, Aurelien ^[5]; Wang, Yutao ^[6]; Piao, Shilong ^[7]; Zhao, Tianbao ^[8]; Schwalm, Christopher R. ^[9];

^[10];

^[11];

^[12]; Poulter, Ben ^[13]; Fang, Yuanyuan ^[14]; Tian, Hanqin ^[15]; Jain, Atul K. ^[16] more »

Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States). Dept. of Industrial and Systems Engineering; Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Environmental Sciences Division and Climate Change Science Inst.
Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Environmental Sciences Division and Climate Change Science Inst.
Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States). Dept. of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX (United States). Jackson School of Geosciences
National Center for Meteorological Research (CNRM) Meteo-France/CNRS, Toulouse (France)
Fudan Univ., Shanghai (China). Fudan Tyndall Center and Dept. of Environmental Science and Engineering
Peking Univ., Beijing (China). Sino-French Inst. for Earth System Science and College of Urban and Environmental Sciences; Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing (China). Key Lab. of Alpine Ecology and Biodiversity, Inst. of Tibetan Plateau Research and CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Science
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing (China). Key Lab. of Regional Climate-Environment Research for East Asia and Inst. of Atmospheric Physics (IAP)
Woods Hole Research Center, Falmouth, MA (United States); Northern Arizona Univ., Flagstaff, AZ (United States). Center for Ecosystem Science and Society
Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Computer Science and Mathematics Division and Climate Change Science Inst.
California Inst. of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States). Jet Propulsion Lab.
National Inst. for Environmental Studies (NIES), Tsukuba (Japan). Center for Global Environmental Research
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States). Biospheric Sciences Lab.
Carnegie Inst. of Science, Stanford, CA (United States). Dept. of Global Ecology
Auburn Univ., AL (United States). International Center for Climate and Global Change Research and School of Forestry and Wildlife Science
Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, IL (United States). Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences
Univ. of Maine, Orono, ME (United States). School of Forest Resources

Runoff in the United States is changing, and this study finds that the measured change is dependent on the geographic region and varies seasonally. Specifically, observed annual total runoff had an insignificant increasing trend in the US between 1950 and 2010, but this insignificance was due to regional heterogeneity with both significant and insignificant increases in the eastern, northern, and southern US, and a greater significant decrease in the western US. Trends for seasonal mean runoff also differed across regions. By region, the season with the largest observed trend was autumn for the east (positive), spring for the north (positive), winter for the south (positive), winter for the west (negative), and autumn for the US as a whole (positive). Based on the detection and attribution analysis using gridded WaterWatch runoff observations along with semi-factorial land surface model simulations from the Multi-scale Synthesis and Terrestrial Model Intercomparison Project (MsTMIP), we found that while the roles of CO₂ concentration, nitrogen deposition, and land use and land cover were inconsistent regionally and seasonally, the effect of climatic variations was detected for all regions and seasons, and the change in runoff could be attributed to climate change in summer and autumn in the south and in autumn in the west. It was also found that the climate-only and historical transient simulations consistently underestimated the runoff trends, possibly due to precipitation bias in the MsTMIP driver or within the models themselves.

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Research Organization:: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)

Sponsoring Organization:: Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER). Earth and Environmental Systems Science Division; California Inst. of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); National Science Foundation (NSF)

Grant/Contract Number:: AC05-00OR22725; NSF-AGS-12-43071

OSTI ID:: 1437884

Journal Information:: Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 13, Issue 5; ISSN 1748-9326

Publisher:: IOP PublishingCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

Citation Metrics:

Cited by: 7 works

Citation information provided by
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Title: Contribution of environmental forcings to US runoff changes for the period 1950–2010

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