Disentangling Climate and Socioeconomic Contributions to Water Shortage in the Western US
Date:
Poster: American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, Washington, DC
Luo, Y., Grogan, D. S., Zuidema, S., Fisher-Vanden, K., Olmstead, S. M., and Srikrishnan, V. 2024. “Disentangling Climate and Socioeconomic Contributions to Water Shortage in the Western US.” American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting. (Poster)
Abstract
Water scarcity in the western United States is a critical and escalating issue, exacerbated by climate change and increased socioeconomic development. This study aims to understand the influences of climate variability and socioeconomic activities on historical and future water shortage events. Using the UNH Water Balance Model (WBM), we integrate natural inputs such as temperature and precipitation with human factors like crop irrigation and population density. Variance decomposition and feature importance techniques are employed to quantify contributions to water shortages. We use single-model initial-condition large ensembles (SMILEs) to look at the impact of internal climate variability on water shortage occurrence and intensity. This approach facilitates a broad analysis including a range of both climate and socioeconomic uncertainties, informing approaches to managing future water shortages.
Citation
Luo, Y., Grogan, D. S., Zuidema, S., Fisher-Vanden, K., Olmstead, S. M., and Srikrishnan, V. (2024). Disentangling Climate and Socioeconomic Contributions to Water Shortage in the Western US. AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, 2024, GC53C-0387.