From this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req), a story about the new paper in today’s Science by Jonathan Overpeck and Brad Udall about climate change in the West. Udall and Overpeck have become fixtures on the western water meeting circuit over the last several years delivering this message, and the paper contains no real surprises. But as the respective heads of the two major federally funded western climate impacts research groups, their standing and choice of venue, I think, makes the paper newsworthy:
The combination of drought and a warming climate pose major problems for Western water supplies in the coming century, according to two of the region’s top climate and water experts.
Climate is changing faster here than anywhere else in the United States, and warming is especially acute in the mountainous region that forms the headwaters of the region’s great rivers, the University of Colorado’s Brad Udall and the University of Arizona’s Jonathan Overpeck wrote in today’s edition of the journal Science.
The paper’s publication comes on the heels of a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation of another record-setting year of low flows on the Colorado River, the primary water supply for much of the Western United States.