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Western Water Assessment White Paper
2015
by Roberta Klein and Lisa Dilling
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service (NOAA/NWS) operates a network of thirteen River Forecast Centers (RFCs) across the country with the intended purpose of providing water management entities, emergency managers, and others with forecasts of streamflow and volumetric water supply at timescales ranging from hourly to seasonal. These predictions, along with others from entities such as the US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in western snow-dominated areas, are designed to provide actionable information that will improve the outcome of a host of decisions relating to issues such as reservoir management, drought restrictions, and flood preparations. NOAA/NWS has made significant investments in developing improved forecasting methods and forecast verification.
Despite these continued technical advances, recent research demonstrates that potential users of forecasts do not always rely on available forecast information in decision making (Werner et al. 2013). Barriers to forecast use have been characterized broadly as technical, financial, legal, cognitive and institutional (Pulwarty and Redmond 1997), and can include political pressure, legal and policy constraints, issues with infrastructure and natural and managed water supply, as well as a lack of scientific background or awareness of forecast availability (Werner et al. 2013).
In an attempt to further understand this disconnect, we developed a study, with input from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center (CBRFC), to investigate characteristics of the users or potential users of CBRFC forecasts (hereafter referred to as “stakeholders”) and their decision making contexts. Previous work has suggested that decision context is an important determinant of how usable information is to decision makers, in addition to the characteristics of information itself such as skill, timing, and accessibility (Dilling and Lemos 2011). Furthermore, water managers who have experienced past weather and climate events such as drought, flood, extreme temperature or precipitation events, etc., are more likely to feel at risk to such events in the future and therefore use forecasts (O’Connor et al. 2005). Accordingly, this study focused specifically on the decision context of CBRFC stakeholders in order to learn:
- Who are CBRFC’s main stakeholders, and what roles do they play in water management?
- What weather and climate events have these stakeholders experienced in the past, what do they see as their most important risks now and in the future, and what kind of strategies have they used in the past and plan to use in the future to reduce the impacts of these events?
- What kinds of decisions do they make, what information do they use to make decisions, where do they obtain that information, and what role does that information play in their decision making processes?
In addition, we leveraged this effort to analyze the utility of a use-inspired scientific project developed by our colleagues at the Western Water Assessment Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments Program (WWA). That effort was aimed at quantifying the contribution of watershed changes—specifically, tree death due to bark beetle infestation along with desert dust deposition on snowpack (“dust on snow”). We investigated whether stakeholders are concerned about these changes and whether improved forecast skill based on the outcome of this project could help to improve stakeholder decision making. Thus we posed an additional set of research questions:
- Are stakeholders aware of and concerned about the impact of dust on snow and bark beetle infestations on streamflow and streamflow forecasts? Would they like information about these impacts? If so, what form should that information take to be usable to them? If forecast skill could be improved by incorporating watershed change information, would that improve stakeholder decision making? Read more …
