 NCAR is a world-leading organization dedicated to understanding earth system science, including our atmosphere, weather, climate, the sun, and the importance of all of these systems to our society. I am really glad that y'all are joining me and us today to learn more about how we better manage water resources. For this event, you'll be able to ask David questions following the lecture, and Olia will help moderate so that we can make sure that we hear from y'all in person as well as our online folks. If you're in person, just raise your hand, we will give you a microphone and you can ask your question. If you're using a microphone, make sure that you're using a microphone so we can hear you. If you're virtually asked the question using Slido. If you are my virtual people, if you scroll down this webpage, you're going to be able to see this Slido window. Just below you're seeing the live stream. If you haven't already, go ahead and click on the green join event button, and then you can ask questions on the Q&A. Also, this is for everyone here. David has a few poll questions that he wants us to participate in. So if you can, please go ahead and start responding on Slido. It is not a test. You already can know the answers, so you can start putting those answers in. In person, you can use your phone as you have been doing by scanning that QR code. Or you can use your laptop, whatever your heart desires. Go to Slido.com and enter the code hashtag NCAR MSR. Aliyah is having the QR code if you need it. And definitely be sure to join Slido so we can see your thoughts in a word cloud. What do you think of when you hear the word water cycle? Because not only do I want to know what David thinks about it, I also want to know what you all think about it, and we are going to get to that very soon. This event is also being recorded and will be available on the NCAR Explorer series website. With us today, I have the pleasure of introducing NCAR scientist David Yates. David Yates is a scientist in the research applications laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. His research has focused both on local-scale hydrologic problems, flash floods, land use, land cover, and climate change, as well as how climate change impacts and adaptation on water and agricultural systems. Dr. Yates has been a part of a development team that has focused on applying water evaluation and planning models to help local, state, and federal water agencies deal with water planning issued at a range of scales, including seasonal forecasting and long-range climate change impacts and adaptation strategies. His collaborations, which are so many, include the development of scientific knowledge, sorry, development of an educational primer for use by the drinking water utility industry that outlines the current stage of scientific knowledge regarding the potential impacts of global climate change on utilities, including impacts on water supply, demand, and relevant water quality characteristics. He also launched a study that focused on robust adaptation strategies with several utilities, including the Inland Empire, El Dorado Irrigation District, Portland Water, Colorado Springs Utilities, Massachusetts Water Resource Authority, Durham Water, and Palm Beach County Water. He has helped everywhere with his models. David Yates received his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder a few years ago. Now, before I turn it over to our great speaker, let's check what your thoughts are on our word cloud. So, Paul and Brett, may you please share a slide over for us. So, this is what you all are thinking about the water cycle. David, where are they? How are they doing? They're doing a good job. What do you think about their answers? Can I get in and I'm going to tell this more about it? Let's go. Let's give you the speech now. Can you turn your mic on? Thank you. Is that good? All right. Well, it's a real pleasure to be here advancing slides. Do I have to do it from the keyboard? Okay, this is the clicker. You're going to advance it. We did not practice this. Okay. Whoa. All right. I get it now. I think. All right. Here we go. Well, it's really a pleasure to be here. Again, nice introduction. I don't need to say anything more about myself. I don't think. So, I advance on to the next slide. See if I can do this. I didn't think about practicing this part. Okay. All right. So, start with the NCAR mission. The NCAR mission of science and service of society. Right. So, I have had in my more than 25 years at NCAR, really having the privilege of taking and doing the hard science that's being done at NCAR in really studying the hydrologic cycle and taking it and transforming it into something useful. And that something useful has been primarily in the water resources sector, as Evie mentioned, working a lot with water utilities and state agencies to help them think about how the water cycle and changes in the water cycle can impact society. This thing, this idea of transformation to something useful, I think, is important. If you think about what I mean, even today, as you came up here, it's precipitating outside. It's a little cold out there. What NCAR does, right, we gather data, we collect data, and we transform it. That data can be measured at instruments. It can be measured or created by models. But there is this transformation process of taking data, putting it into information, and eventually knowledge. And if you think about it, we do this all the time. And they have this little pyramid of data information knowledge. The data we collect, for example, is temperature. So, we have instruments that go measure the air temperature. That's the data. And NCAR has a whole lab that's the Earth Observing Laboratory that measures things, collects data. But then, there's this transformation of that data into information. Something that's useful for people, right? So, we measure the temperature out there with maybe 32 degrees, because it was snowing, right? So, you took and transformed that measurement of 32 degrees into information, and hopefully that information, you made an action on it. You came. I can't believe how many of you came here. I thought, oh, maybe the snow will drive people away. But you thought, well, that transformation of that 32 degrees, the snow, into some kind of knowledge. You made an action. So, that's a simple example of this transformation. But water managers, of course, do that all the time. They do this transformation of taking, they collect data. They're a very data intensive industry, the water providers at all places, whether it be ministries or states or federal agencies. They're all about collecting data and understanding it and making good decisions about how we should manage our water. So, this transformation, if you will. And that's essentially what NCAR does, right? We do this, we work a lot on this transformation of data, information, and knowledge. And at the heart of it is the water cycle, right? One could argue that at NCAR, this is what we do. We have laboratories and scientific groups that study all the aspects of the hydrologic cycle. And whether it's observing it, understanding it, modeling it, this is at the heart of what NCAR does, this understanding of the hydrologic cycle. And this is, I'll say that in this description or this talk, what I thought I would do is in some ways tell you the story that I go tell water managers that are thinking about how our changes in this hydrologic cycle perhaps going to impact how I manage and deal with my water system. There was a famous paper about, it was about 10 years ago by Chris Milley. The title of the paper was Climate Change. Stationarity is Dead wither water management. Because water managers basically are, they operate on the principle of stationarity in their climate. They have this dependence or hope or expectation that their reservoirs will operate in a certain way under this assumption of stationarity. Of course, climate change, the alterations of the atmosphere puts into question perhaps that assumption of stationarity. So that's essentially what we're doing at NCAR, right? Is understanding these different components of the hydrologic cycle. So I have my question, my first Slido question. It's the first time I've done this Slido thing so maybe as good as my operation of the clicker. Here we go with the Slido question. What, if you remember that slide I just showed before, what was missing from this diagram? That's the Slido question. Okay. What is missing from this water cycle? Are people already answering that question? Oh my gosh, that's fast. Okay. I don't see anybody in the audience typing. So is those online people answering that question? Okay, mostly online. Okay, let's see. Stores the moon, put the moon. Okay, sublimation. Okay. Ah. And mine was, yeah, the human interventions. There's no people in this water cycle, right? So this, this is a very earth science-centric water cycle without humans. And as I mentioned, I've had the privilege at NCAR basically trying to take the physical science, this water cycle science and bring it to stakeholders, bring it to water managers, bring it to water agencies to help them think about how past, present, and future climate might be changing and how that might impact how they operate and manage their water systems. Now do we go, so you'll begin my first time to have the Slido thing back to my presentation. Oh, you guys are good. Okay. So what I'm going to do is again, I'm going to tell that story that I would go tell, I'll even say maybe the skeptical water manager who's been said climate change is important and it could impact our water supply system. Maybe there, you know, maybe the, you know, this, I don't like using the word believe, but you hear it a lot. Do you believe in climate change? Unfortunately, I don't like it because it's not a belief, it's just science. So again, my message to water managers when there's some skepticism around climate change, you just looked at that water cycle diagram is the atmosphere is really thin and really sensitive. I love this picture, right? From the, just looking about, you know, what are the earth is 20, 29,000, you know, the diameter is 29,000 miles. In the atmosphere, think of, we talk about a thin atmosphere even here in Boulder, we're at 5,000 feet, though the, oh, we're high elevation. You think about it, the atmosphere is as thin as a sheet of paper, right? Relatively speaking, it is very sensitive to small changes in perturbations that, that water cycle, those little adjustments and changes in there lead to a different outcome. And the, you know, the experiment you could argue that humans are doing by increasing the concentration of CO2 gases in the atmosphere will alter that cycle of it and have ramifications. So again, that message is the atmosphere is thin and it's sensitive to change. I mean, I don't know how many went to the lunar eclipse a few years ago, any lunar eclipse visitors? Did you go to totality? If you, totality, if you weren't in totality, you didn't see the eclipse, sorry to tell you that. I know, but because it was amazing, right? Here the moon blocks the sun for a few minutes and it was almost immediately cold, right? I mean, just the sensitivity again of the atmosphere to even small changes, so that wasn't a small change, but it was only for a few minutes and the, you know, it cooled. So again, the message of the earth is sensitive to change and the, and CO2 concentrations are part of that change. So this figure is, now I, you know, there's going to be some figures in here. I use, I call them horrendograms sometimes. I don't have any horrendograms, but I hopefully have just simple figures that can, you know, tell a good story. And I don't know if people have seen this, but this is, you know, CO2 reconstruction way back. And then, you know, the recent CO2 concentrations measured and, you know, clearly an anthropogenic signal. So the anthropogenic fingerprint of increasing greenhouse gases is at the end of that. And then we, you know, we at NCAR are asking ourselves, well, what are the implications of that change on the atmosphere? And again, fundamentally of what we do at NCAR is study that cycle and all those, those different components and all those different components of the cycle. And it's complicated, right? It is complicated. So some of the changes that we should expect. And again, remember what I'm telling you is the message that I'm telling water providers that the atmosphere is sensitive to change. The results that I'm going to show are largely based on models. You know, models are even developed at NCAR here that try to understand how these changes, these perturbations to the, to the atmosphere might impact, for example, temperature. So here, you know, here's some projected changes in temperature by 2090. This result is actually maybe a 10 years old, this graph. We, it's called the intergovernmental panel on climate change, that IPCC. You see AR5, that's assessment report five. Assessment report six has been published so recently. So, so the science is advancing. But the take home message here is a addition of CO2 gas is a little bit of a warming of the atmosphere. So, and the poles will warm faster, land, you know, inland areas will warm faster than ocean areas. And the, and so on. Precipitation, of course, again, the message to water managers who have to deal with extremes. We saw the extremes from last year in California, right? They went from, and I'll show some slides about that later. They went from severe drought to, you know, too little and too much, right? Almost overnight, literally. And so again, our climate models, this idea of intensification of the hydrologic cycle, which is kind of one of the messages of increasing greenhouse gases, that amplification of the hydrologic cycle means when it rains, it could rain harder. And we kind of see evidence of that even in the observational record, and our models support that signal, that when, you know, extreme precipitation can become, likely be more extreme because, again, just that amplification. And again, our models are showing that. So there's this observation of these kinds of changes. And then we kind of can see it in some of our modeling work. So that, that. Now, now I'll transition a bit to a bit more local, kind of the local story. And this is not, this is observational changes. Again, put your water manager hat on, I'm lecturing to you about the things that you should be worried about that CO2 gases are intensifying the hydrologic cycle. Those leads to warming and intensification of precipitation. Warming, of course, impacts snow. And that's what this graph is. So this graph is, you know, the climate has, there's already been, and without attribution, we already see some changes. These are changes in snowpack in the Western US. And of course, for Western water managers, most of our water is actually not stored in reservoirs. It's actually stored in our snowpack, especially in Colorado. We don't have a lot of big storage reservoirs, right? So we really rely on water being stored in that snowpack for our water supply. And what you see here is the reds are less, you know, less snowpack. And then the next one is the timing. Of course, timing is a big issue too for water managers, particularly in the West. If our, if our snowpack melts off earlier, we'll have, you know, comes off March, April, when we needed in August and September, that will be a problem too, because we lose that storage. And so that is a problem too. This is just, you know, showing this is Glacier National Park, some reductions in glaciers. So the signal of warming is here. We see it, we'd see in our observational record, and our models are sort of backing up this kind of evidence as well. So that the changes in the snowpack. Let's see. So another slide question. Thank you. So how might, oh, how might climate change impact, I've lost the question. How might impact the hydrologic cycle? Intensification, storminess, drought, increased rainfall? Nice answers. I don't think so. I don't think so. We'd have to, yeah, too much or not enough water. And let's see that too. We've certainly seen that recently, right? Too much and too little, right? So managing both of those extremes. And that's, you know, for water managers, that's what they, that's what they, you know, that's what they do on a daily basis, is basically manage to the extremes, especially in California. Oh my gosh. So, and I'll, I'll give some examples of why, why, why are there particular challenges in California, right? All right. Thank you. So I'm just going to show, so I, now you keep your water manager hat on, but now I'll transition a bit and just tell a few stories of places where we're seeing some of these changes or some of the challenges of water resource management. Terry Fulton, the crowd just looked familiar to me. Terry was manager of this reservoir. So just, it's in the news a lot, the Colorado River, right? Lake Powell, Lake Mead, lots of things going on there. So just thought I'd just tell a quick story about that, right? You remember that 2023 was a wet year. We had this perception that, wow, it's good, it's going to be, you know, lots of runoff, which there is. And this is just, you know, some, some, some pictures of that. And here's this, here's a time series. Here's, I'll maybe take a second to explain this graph. So I said, this is a science talk. There'll be some graphs in here, but this is a pretty simple one. This is the black line is the relative storage in Lake Powell. So if it's 100% the lake's full. And so this is, you know, down in 2022, there were all the world, you know, we saw people saw the bathtub bringing images of Lake Powell going down 2023 was a wet year. Even though, you know, so the, and the orange line or the orange, green and blue lines are inflows in the Lake Powell. So you see even in 2011, sort of an epic runoff year, yes, Powell and Mead went up, but their storage is so big that, yes, they can benefit from that inflow and they did in 2023 this year, but we all gonna need multiple years to fill Powell and Mead, right? So that's a lot going on between the upper and lower basin states in the negotiations of some of these water rights. It's complicated, but hopefully they'll figure it out. Terry, do you have hope? We have great hope. We have great hope. Good. Good. All right. So that's my Colorado River example. See if I can advance it. Oh, come on. My next one. What is it doing? Stuck. Advance manually. I think I'm doing the right button. The big one, right? Uh-oh. Help. Manually. Okay. Oh, there's Google Chrome needs to be updated. I think that's the problem. I'm going to say later if that's okay with everyone. That's the problem. Yes, it's stuck. Is it stuck? Because, yes, Google, that's funny. Sorry, Paul. Let's see. So much for my next act. No. Oh, there we go. Try again. Can I go? Okay, there we go. Okay. So, yeah. So now let's move westward, California, and just tell that story, right? I've worked in California a lot with the Department of Water Resources, California, a big state, agriculture dominates its water use. It uses a lot of water. You kind of, people have this perception that there's a lot of water storage in reservoir storage, which there is, but compared to Powell and Meade, it's small. So here is the drought index in 2022. California is panicking, right? In the winter of 2022 thinking, I mean, the reservoirs are already just being stretched to the limit. And if 2023 were another dry year, they were going to be in big trouble. And in fact, most of the forecasts back last year, the seasonal outlooks, hey, what's the water you're going to look like was bad for California. We didn't do a very good job of the seasonal forecast coming one year ago, going into that next year, if you look at it. But then, one year later, there's the drought map of California. They just, you know, that train of atmospheric rivers that flowed into California saved their butts, right? They really had got to recover, even to the point of like, where they're going to have to make emergency releases from their reservoirs. And yes, they have a lot of reservoirs, but, and here they're all of their, not all of them, but a lot of them filled, right? Shasta. Shasta is the big one up in the northern part of the state. Oroville was the one a few years ago, which had this kind of risk of failure. But they filled basically from that 2023, all of those atmospheric rivers really supported the recovery of California water. But what it also points to is, they could bust again, right? A couple more dry years. So California is just more vulnerable. That's a lot of talk about, you know, adding additional storage. There's one reservoir who's accurate in my love, Nodos, Nodos, north of Delta, off-stream storage. So the idea is to put a reservoir in California off of the stream, right? Because right now, in California, the northern part of the climate, they're actually taking a couple reservoirs out for salmon restoration. So they're losing storage. So one of the ideas is to put reservoirs off-stream, you know, off of main channels so the fish can still go where they need to go, but still have still enhanced storage. So there's some projects there. I would be remiss without going east for a minute. In fact, this is, we're working a little bit in the Delaware River Basin at NCAR with the US Geological Survey. So the Delaware River Basin is an interesting place. I think that east is, you know, it's wet, certainly relative to California in the western US. Yes, it's wet, but I don't know if people are aware. The city of New York, New York's water supply comes from the upper part of the Delaware River Basin. I don't have a pointer, but where New York, that New York line is, three reservoirs are the main water supply for New York City. Huge tunnels take water out of the headwaters of the Delaware River Basin and pump it into New York City. It's really an amazing system because it's what's called untreated water, right? They just, they don't filter it. So it's like this pristine water in this part of Upper Delaware. But here in the 1960s was the drought of record, right? Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Let's see if I had it. Yay, it worked. So could George Washington have crossed the Delaware, right? In 1960s, maybe he could have just walked across, right? So we're studying this and asking the questions about, you know, what if the 1960s drought were to return? Again, this intensification of the hydrologic cycle, let's get wetter and maybe dries get drier. So could, what would, how would the Delaware River Basin respond if the 1960s drought were to occur today? And it's just some of the challenges. Let me see if I can go to this next one. So here is the lower part of the Delaware. This is going into the Delta. You see the, let's see if I got my colors right here. The red is the 1960s drought of record. You see that red marker? That's the position where the salt front from the bay moved upstream because the rivers are low and you have this tide coming in pushing salt up the Delaware River. So that's the red mark. That's how far up it got. The black line is the drinking water intake for the Philadelphia water supply. So the Delaware River Basin Commission is basically in the job of making sure that low salinity water makes it to that intake. And so we've actually been working with the USGS, developed, thinking about how climate and climate change might challenge some of that management strategy. So, okay. All right. So now I'm going to, now I'm going to transfer, no, shift, shift a little bit here and talk a little bit about what we do at NCAR in terms of, so some of the science we're doing in terms of the hydrologic cycle going, now this is a more, this is that hydrologic cycle kind of repeated, but here more in a process oriented. And we have science groups at NCAR who focus on each one of these components and spend a lot of time thinking how they all fit together, right? And creating models that put all these things together. And they're darn complicated, these models that model these hydrologic, that basically encompass and represent the hydrologic cycle. Aerosols. Aerosols are really complicated, right? The soot and we're not soot. The little particles in the air for which all raindrops form. So aerosols and they completely complicate cloud physics. But I think NCAR has been up for the challenge and has done an admirable job. So we developed climate models. And a climate model is all run on supercomputers here at NCAR, big investments by the National Science Foundation in developing computing capability to be able to model the earth systems. And so this is just kind of a representation when you say you model the earth system, we divide the earth into little grid boxes and we solve all of those water cycle equations within each of those grid boxes and put it all together. You know, we have to conserve, you know, of course Newton's laws still apply, conserve mass and conserve energy, right? You have to do all that conservation. I think sometimes they're called general equilibrium models, right? Because they're achieving the equilibrium of the climate system. So that's what we do here at NCAR. And I'm going to show a cool animation. This is this is the model, right? This is a model. This is not observations. So this is the NCAR model. This is actually kind of an old animation being run at 25 kilometers, but you even see cyclones and hurricanes being generated. The realism of the climate system from climate models is quite spectacular, right? So you see, look at off the coast of Florida or even off the coast of Mexico, you see the generation of cyclones across the planet. So it's cool. So, you know, I go, the science being done here to support understanding the hydrologic cycle is really quite astounding. All right, so a Slido question. Oh, yeah. So this is, this is a, because you don't know this yet. What are some of the, what are some of the tools that NCAR has developed or helped develop in supporting water managers? Ah, so they had the answers. Yeah. I think this one's a little out of place, but man, because you haven't seen, I'm going to show you, I'm going to talk about some of the models we built. So you won't, you won't know this as well as us, but so we probably should have put this one later. So it's okay. So these are, we're going to talk about some of these models. We'll skip to the next one. Thank you. Okay. So here they are, which I shouldn't, you know, so here are some of the tools that we developed at NCAR to basically to understand and manage the water cycle. So that, that animation that I just showed is essentially this, the model called the CESM, the Community Earth Systems Model, which is that model that we're running out on the globe to understand, you know, the global hydrologic cycle. But that earth and those little, the grid boxes of the earth, running that on a supercomputer is really computationally expensive. Those grid boxes that I showed that solve all of those equations are generally right now run at about a hundred kilometer. That's the scale. And every time you make that box smaller, you, like have the box, you need about 10 times more computing power. So it's very nonlinear, the, that computing requirement. So we've come up with all sorts of strategies to model, like local systems, like the, the MPASS. And let's see what are the ones. WARF, the Weather Research Forecast Model, WARF. These are what's called local models because they can resolve things more finely. And I've been involved in, you know, developing some of these models. And I'm going to be, you know, again, for brevity and because we're focusing on water, I'm going to be talking about one model in particular. This is the WARF hydro model, which is an application that we developed here at NCAR, kind of in response to, again, water managers, the needs to understand processes on the land surface and serve water managers and early warning systems. So I'm going to, I'm going to describe that. And this is, this is a busy slide. I acknowledge that, but it's the, you know, again, some of the slides that get a little busy, I mean to, in some ways, be purposefully the busy, because they're busy, they're detailed. There's a lot of detail in the model. So we, this is, this is again, WARF hydro. It's a community model for hydrologic prediction across, you know, we're now going to show you across even the continental U.S. So the novelty of this model is that it's, you see this word multi-scale, we're able to go actually deploy this over the whole continental U.S. And we've done this in the last 10 years in partnership with NOAA to sort of advance the ability to create hydrologic prediction across the continental U.S. So, you know, just in cartoon form, you see the processes that we represent make sense, you know, again, representing the hydrologic cycle, the generation of runoff, its transformation into rivers and its routing and movement down river networks to reservoirs. So that's essentially what WARF hydro does in all of its, in all of its glory. So it has this, and I think just telling, again, telling the story of NCAR's involvement in developing this in partnership with NOAA. Maybe, you know, this is kind of a community talk, so just so you would go, oh, NCAR is collaborating closely with institutions like, or agencies like NOAA, where we're working together to develop this kind of capacity. And one of NOAA's mission, NOAA's mission out of the Office of Water Planning is to provide operational flood forecasting, right? And they came to us now 10 years ago, said, well, we create an operational forecast at many places, but a lot of places are not served. Around the country in our, we call the river forecast centers, we have one, where's our river forecast center? Colorado? Utah? The river forecast centers, they have the operational mission of providing for flood forecasts. There's eight of them, but a lot of places they would provide no forecast for. So we work with NOAA over time to generate, call it 24-7 across the whole continental U.S., the ability to create a forecast for each place. For those local, another part of developing this capability came out of the 2013 flood that happened here in the front range. I don't know, you know, if people are here, you remember this event, and I don't know if I, do I click this to get the animation, because it's not going. Will I click it, or I'm going to try? Oh, no, don't do it on the computer. Let's see if I can go back yet. Okay, so it's, okay. So this, this was, I could say, kind of sold wharf hydro as this tool to do hydrologic prediction. So this is the 2013 flood, that heavy rainfall, and you see the propagation of water through the channels and that down through Boulder. So this was kind of one of our, you know, kind of watershed, no, I guess, literally watershed moments, I didn't mean that. Yes, that was, I didn't plan that, of hydrologic, of using wharf hydro for operational hydrologic prediction. And was this, you know, this was after 2013, I bet we can model that flood event, and so we worked on that. Let's see one more, yeah. Now, so then after the 2013, this is when we started working with the Office of Water Prediction, with the, with the idea of serving unserved locations, creating 24-7, 365 forecasting capability, again for unserved locations. This has 2.7 million river reaches in it. And, and you know, it, a lot of it, you know, it's a model, it's all wrong to say all models are wrong, some are useful as the famous thing. So, but, but it was being, could you do this in some ways? Could you make an operational system that could generate this kind of forecast across the whole continental US running on one computer? And it's still running operationally at NOAA. We still keep working with them. Now there's, down in Tuscaloosa, the water center is helping, again, NCAR with NOAA and the water center working collaboratively, collaboratively to develop this, this operational capability. Okay, so how am I doing for time? Okay. So, so that, that NCAR modeling the water cycle with a bunch of different tools and models and communities, you know, let's say communities of communities really at NCAR, working on different aspects, hydrology, that's been my focus. That, I demonstrated a set of models focusing on what, or hydro. Now I'm going to transition just a little bit in the, my, my remaining minutes here is just kind of tell a story about some of the work that I've done on water supply forecasting. Again, water managers, especially in Colorado, anticipating what's it going to be next year. Again, snowpack in Colorado is the main mechanism for storage. Yes, there's some reservoirs, but, but most of, think about it, so almost like, it's almost like philosophical. People think, oh, the reservoirs in Colorado where you store the water. No, it's kept in the snowpack. We move it down to a reservoir really almost simply to divert it, and I'll show that. So we've been working on measurements, collecting data, remember my, my triangle, data information knowledge, taking data, trying to transform it into information. That top right figure, that colored image is actually an aircraft flying over and looking at the snow. It's called an airborne snow observatory. So they're making flights over the snowpack and seeing if they can, with radar, see if they can measure the snowpack better. Right, because we just go measure points with radar, you can actually get a spatial map. So that's what that top one is. My colleague Dave Gotchis has done a lot of observations of setting up towers and instruments to measure snow and to look at, at, at different meteorological features. So, so that's what I'm going to just talk a little bit about this idea of water, seasonal water supply forecasting. So another Slido question, what are some of the perceived risks for water managers? That's a good one. Now all of the people here in the audience are, no one's Slidoing, right? I don't know how the Slido works. I'm so confused by it. Okay, okay, let's go to the next one. Okay, so, okay, so I'm, again, finishing here with talking about a project or an activity that I've worked on with some of the front range water provider. So I thought I will kind of bring the talk home someplace local that I bet everyone can relate to. Ah, look familiar. We're one of those yellow dots there, those yellow dots, population, right? So, you know, I don't know how much you appreciate the fact that what we, you know, what happens, the red lines on that graph are tunnels. So what we do in all of these, a lot of these upper Colorado river basin headwater areas is we collect water and then divert it through tunnels. If you hiked up in the upper blue river basin, you'd go find infrastructure in these little creeks where they actually physically move gates and move water, for example, over to the Hoosier Tunnel and they push it through Hoosier Tunnel. It's amazing that these people did this, what, 100 years ago almost, built these tunnels. You know, Robert's Tunnel, Robert's Tunnel comes out of Dillon Reservoir. So Dillon Reservoir, that spills into the Middle Fork and South Platte and look, you know, an amazing infrastructure, right, this big, long tunnel and of course the Moffitt Tunnel taking upper Frazier. And again, these, these very complex collection systems, if you, most, most of us don't realize that they're there, right? You don't see them, but they're there moving water across the watershed and pushing it through. And here's what it looked like, Boulder, you know, turn of the century, right? There's Old Main in Boulder. There's no trees, right? It's because we made all of this diversion of water into the Western, into the, onto the front range that, you know, a lot of the trees and all of the landscape that we see out there is there. There's Old Main back in, back in the day. So that diversion of water has certainly supported, you know, the development of the front range through all those tunnels. And now I'll talk about a little bit about Colorado water rights because I said, again, I do this work of transferring the science at NCAR working with water managers so I got to know something about water rights in Colorado or in most of the Western U.S. It's called first in time, first in right, right? So the people that were there first and claimed the water right are the ones that, that get to use it first. The, it, for those, if you drive, I'm assuming everybody, at least in the audience here, I don't know about online, you know, from Colorado, you've driven through Glenwood Canyon. And Glenwood Canyon, if you drive there, there's a structure. There's like this, it's a, looks like a power station. Well, it is a power station. It's the Excel energy power plant. It's called the Chichon power plant and it's the senior water right in 1912. So the Chichon water right, which is called, it's called the run of river water right. It doesn't, it's not consumptive. It just takes water off the river and runs it back through the power plant and generates. But it is the senior water right and it dictates how all the upstream users who are junior water rights users or holders react. So Colorado Springs, utilities, Denver water, all, northern water, all of these are junior, we'll call junior water rights holders to this 1912 Chichon right. And so one of the things that I've done with, at NCAR, is gone and talk with water managers that are asking what happens if the snow comes earlier? What happens if, you know, there's no snowpack? How is our right going to be impacted? And are we still going to be able to make deliveries and meet our water supply requirements? So there's the Chichon plant. Again, now hopefully next time you drive through Glenwood Canyon, look for it. It's quite a structure. And again, it is the senior water right on the, on the Colorado River. And in fact, if you even Google it now, I think it's making the news because there is some talk about like the, some of the water, some of the front-range people renegotiating this right with Excel energy, although Excel energy is going to hold onto it. The other thing is, it's Excel's right, but it really benefits like fisheries, boaters, all of the downstream users, they like it. So Hoosier, I've, again, working with Colorado Springs Utilities. This is their tunnel that they divert through. And let me see if I can just go back one here. So they divert there. You see Dillon and Green Mountain Reservoir. These were all built as part of what's called the, this upper Colorado, the Bureau of Reclamation, building or operating these systems in order to make sure the senior water rights are met and the junior water rights guys are happy. And it gets very complicated. It gets really complicated. The water rights lawyers make a good living up here in the upper Colorado because the water rights are complicated. And I'm not going to go into the details, but what I'll show you is, I again have been working with agencies like Colorado Springs Utilities making models. So one of those models that I showed is something that I developed or have helped develop and making a model of this upper Colorado river system. And again, not to get too immersed in the details, but there's the Blue River, you see Breckenridge there. This is the water system just of the upper part. This is Colorado Springs Utilities collection system. Here's the Hoosier tunnel down here. So it's this very, I mean, it's not complicated. There's a lot of plumbing that goes on and there's a lot of water rights that go on of how Colorado Springs Utilities can take advantage of this water. So I've been working with them. One of the questions they ask is, well, what if climate changes? What if our watershed warms a little bit? How vulnerable is this system? There's a reservoir that spills into here. They're even asking, should we raise this reservoir a bit? We can actually add a little bit of capacity to this reservoir. If the timing of the snowmelt changes a little bit and our right changes a little bit, this is Montgomery Reservoir. Again, for those that are familiar with the area, Hoosier Pass. If you're going up Hoosier Pass to Breckenridge, it's a little reservoir at the bottom that's important for Colorado Springs Utilities. They take a 100-mile pipeline out of Montgomery Reservoir all the way to their terminating reservoirs for their water supply. Again, they're asking fundamental questions. What's the reliability of that storage system? I've been working with them to build models, think about climate, think about climate change. I think that's my last line. I think I do it pretty good. Is that timing is pretty good? All right. That's what I think. Oh, yeah, I've had one more because this is the product. This is what we do for them at the Carr Springs Utilities. I said water supply forecasting. I forgot that I had one more. So just to demonstrate, what do they want? What does Carr Springs Utilities want? They want to know, starting in February, March, April, what is the expectation of how much water they should get? And note that I have up there forecasting legally and physically available. So that water model, this very busy model, I forgot to have this, this very busy model, why is it so busy? This is a water system. Why is it so busy? Because they have both a physical availability and a legal availability. So this model is meant to kind of encompass both their physical right and their legal right. How much water can we take? They have a very complicated part too, because if they take water with what they call out of priority, and they sometimes have to pay it back. So if they take water that they're not supposed to, they can sometimes pay it back. Hopefully, nobody from Carr Springs Utilities. So we built this tool for them to provide a forecast. So this is what we did. Here's, for example, in 2023, this is an operational forecasting system where every week we're providing them, hey, here's what we're expecting, your legally and physically available water to be this coming year. Yeah. Now that was it. I forgot about that last one. Okay. Thank you. Let's move on to the question and answer portion. We have some questions on mine, but I want to open the floor to our in-person audience first. So if you have a question, raise your hand. Alia will run. It's on. I'm working with a CU undergraduate student on a research project that involves the gross reservoir, gross dam enhancement. I know it's very controversial and it's pretty close to home in Boulder. Can you speak to that in terms of the pros and cons of whether that reservoir will be filled or not given climate change and why Denver water is moving ahead with it? Well, I can't speak to why Denver water would move ahead. And as far as filling it, most of the, like it would be filled from trans base and water, most likely, right? It would be, so it wouldn't, it would probably get some local water input, but it would also be supported by the trans base and delivery. They have a right, you know, Denver, I don't know, I'm not, don't represent Denver water, so I can't speak for them. But, you know, in the, in the Frasier, that's the Frasier River Valley, which is where they, Moffat Tunnel, right? So if they have some unused right, in theory, they could go store to gross. So that's, I'm sure they're going to do their due diligence to see if that, the reliability of that storage, you know, that satisfies, yeah, yeah, I think, I don't think, yeah, they definitely would, that, that, that extra, I would bet, although I'm not speaking for Denver water, you know, but I'm guessing as a scientist that they will probably fill it with their trans base and water. Trans base and water, once you divert it and store it, it's yours. We have a question in line, Dr. Yates. This is from Debbie Martin, who wants to know if you have studied other situations similar to the Buffalo Creek fire or different area has affected the distribution and intensity of rain? Yes, good question. Like, long ago at NCAR, I actually worked on the Buffalo Creek fire and asked that exact question. So I did do, I've worked on Buffalo Creek, but also at NCAR, there's a lot of work on the impact of wildfire on hydrologic response. I don't do a lot of that, but it is going on at NCAR. And I think we have another question in the room. You talked about Colorado Springs as an example where they are physically and legally able to get water and use it. What if the water supply is less than demand? What happens? Well, you know, their water supply is pretty complex and diverse, right? So they have this supply, they call that the South Platte, the Upper South Platte, but then they have a bunch of local supplies behind Pike's Peak, behind the Rampart Range, even some local water supplies. I mean, you know, Colorado Springs is actually, you know, one thing that's happened with the municipal water supply demand is actually the trend is going down, right? So conservation in lots of these communities has been pretty effective. You know, water utilities have an interesting, you know, there are a few businesses where they tell their customers to consume less, right? You think about it, right? And yet they have a lot of high capital costs. Capital costs are huge. So they've got to meet that baseline, those baseline expenses. So when consumption goes, water consumption goes down and they're selling less water, they get into a financial pinch. So it's this, it's balanced between. So I think conservation is the answer to a lot of these water utility shortages. And their business model is tough because they're a public good. Could snowpack be increased by making ice on north facing slope? Well, yeah, weather mod, right? So if you've heard, seen, seen some of the term is weather modification, right? And go, you know, you can Google it. Wyoming has a big program. In fact, working with NCAR on, on cloud, you know, it's cloud seeding effectively, right? Right. So cloud seeding, weather mod, we have a program with Wyoming. We've worked in Idaho. So a lot of work on, call it snowpack enhancement via weather modification. So, yes. Now, the science is uncertain of whether there's a lot of benefit to it. So, you know, that's part of what we do at NCAR is going, is, is it viable? Is it possible? You know, is it scientifically feasible? Like we go do scientifically based experiments where, you know, we seed some clouds and we don't seed others and then see, do you see a signal between the two? Yes. Well, let me take a lot to keep that ice cold. Yeah. It's called winter. We have a virtual question from Jenna. She wanted to know who or what groups on water rights? It's a government, businesses, individuals, et cetera. Yes. Yes. Yes. All of the above, right? I mean, water rights are all of those businesses individual. I mean, they're marketable, right? They're marketed things. So you can buy and sell water rights. I'm not a water rights expert. But yes, although they're, although this is an interesting point. I say, I'm not a, I grew up in Colorado. I grew up in the Blue River. So that I, so I actually own a water right, the Blue River pump and pipeline water right that my dad got. And it's actually a pretty big water right, 250 acre feet. Yeah. You know, 250 acre feet. But it has no marketable value because we've never put it to beneficial use. So in Colorado, it's this water right user, you know, it's user-lubid. You have to show beneficial use. So even though I own a water right of .2 CFS, 200, I think I calculated, I can't sell it essentially because I've never shown any beneficial use because it's just a municipal, I mean, it serves two houses that were built in 1965, this water supply. In fact, the water commissioner came up and looked at it and his jaw dropped because he's like, never seen this before. So you can't, that's, yes, the question, who owns water rights? Everyone. You can sell them. But the complication of western water law water right is you have to prove beneficial use. And if you don't, then that water right is removed. And is it sold, Terry? You know, once the nature of the right, yeah, they're complicated. Again, the lawyers make out like a man. Yeah. I know that the IPCC has various scenarios about how much our climate is going to change and how fast it is going to change. Can you make some comments about the rate of change of climate in the different scenarios versus the possible rate of change in water infrastructure to address those changes? I mean, I think we see some change rates going on, right? I mean, whether or not that's what we call it anthropogenic or human it caused is still I think some, no, yeah, some, I don't know. So but I certainly in the West, no, probably, we can't mean we haven't built a dam or right, we haven't added new infrastructures really, really slow in the West now used to not be, but now it is. So I think we're, I don't know, I don't give us much hope of adapting. I think our adaptations will be more individual than big infrastructure or whatever. But I don't know. That's a deep question, Bob. I don't know. Roughly 80% of the water, as I understand it, roughly 80% of the water coming out of the Rockies now goes to agriculture. Yeah. So it's always seemed to me like money, money flows uphill to water. Yeah. Water flows uphill to money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the cities can certainly afford a lot more per acre foot than any agricultural operation could. Is that, is that sort of makes sense? Oh, yeah, I mean, absolutely. Although, you know, I think Western agricultural productivity is high, right? I think, you know, I mean, this is now a debate of whether it's a good use of water and, you know, we've got to eat. So, you know, the, the use of water for food production in the West is, is, it's prolific, right? We use it, I think, I think pretty efficiently. I don't know, I guess we could, that's almost becomes again a philosophical argument, but, but Weld County is one of the most productive agricultural counties in the U.S., right? That's taking advantage of those trans-basin deliveries. Now, there are some crazy, crazy transactions going on, like out of the Imperial Valley, the all-American canal, stories of, you know, we ship our hay to China. See those stories, right? We grow hay and wheat, or not, not wheat. We grow hay in the Imperial Valley of California and then containerize it and ship it to China for a feed, for dairy industry. Now, that is crazy. So, I think those are the kinds of changes that, but, but maybe by, maybe economies of scale are, are supporting that, right? Well, the containers are empty, right? They ship all other stuff, they're empty containers, so they're shipping over electronics, we're shipping over hay. Hi, I have two questions. You are talking about seeding the clouds. I'd like to know what other types of manipulation are being done, and then my other question is totally non-related. What is the point of Slido? I mean, I pulled it up and I got these questions, and I mean, what was the point? Yes, sir. Do you take the first one? I'll take the second one. Yeah, I can, I think I take the second one. Okay, good. In my defense on the Slido, it's my first time of Slido-ing. I see, so I'll answer the second one, to engage the audience, right? Just to keep, to make it feel like we're more engaged with you. That's the purpose of Slido. But my first time ever, I'm, I'm, you can tell my novice use of Slido. So, thank you for your patience. And then on your first question, cloud seeding, you know, at NCAR, we do have a cloud seeding program where we scientifically go and, but that's it, right? I mean, that's the, for the most part, that's all we do in terms of what, you know, what do they call geoengineering? I think of that, which you're kind of alluding to. You know, weather modification that we do at NCAR is primarily like a cloud seeding research. We have a program with the state of Wyoming. In fact, we just this week renewed our program with the state of Wyoming to do cloud seeding research with them, like in the Wind River range and the Snowy Range. We've gone and flown aircraft and studied and collected data on the merits and the potential for cloud seeding, winter cloud seeding in some of those mountain ranges. And the state of Idaho is also in collaboration. But that's primarily, it, as far as I know, that's the, that's what I'm aware of is, is cloud seeding activity. We have one online. We will not forget you. We have one online right now. Can we please? Sure. So with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, what rain and water become more acidic? And how would that affect how we use water? I'm not a water chemist at all. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that, Chris. Any guesses? I know. Well, I mean, you're, I'm going to ask you twice. That's, I'm done. I thought maybe you might know. Sorry. Okay. Now, I don't know the answer to that one. Sorry. Sorry. Maybe we could ask, maybe we could ask ChatGVT. She might know. Bernadette will be fine. Okay. Sorry. We have an in-person question. Thank you. One of the questions, one of the slides that you have showed the evolution of worth hydro. And the last point in that graph was like USGS, 20, 20 something in the future. Can you elaborate a little more about the future? Yeah. Yeah. We have entered in the last two years in the partnership with the US Geological Survey to advance their earth systems modeling capability in general. And so it's just like they have some models. We have some models. We have just a program. It's kind of a joint collaboration with them in doing science with them. One of the big products coming out of that collaboration, for example, was a, and that as a study where we used one of the models, the, the Worf model, the Weather Research Forecast model, which it's called, the experiment was called the CONUS, which is the continental US, CONUS 404, four kilometers for 40 years, actually 40 years for four kilometers, 404, right? So we ran this regional climate model over the continental US at four kilometer resolution. Remember I said those little grid boxes of a climate model when they get smaller, it's really computationally intensive. So this collaboration with the USGS, this CONUS 404, was running a regional climate model for 40 years at four kilometers and doing the science with them. And, and for example, one of the things that comes out is like snow. Snow in the Rockies is something like we don't, I showed some of the measuring and understanding snow is really difficult. And we actually think that the computer model, the model that's modeling all of these water cycle processes can do a pretty good job of understanding snow processes. So we're, you know, USGS is a science institution, right? So it's really working with the USGS to kind of build and advance their science. We have one question that's virtual. And it's, how does ET, which I think stands for evapotranspiration, affect flood, flood, peaks, enforce it, watersheds. Also, could you define what evapotranspiration is? Chris? No, I'm just kidding. You know this one. So good question. He, you know, it would be ET side would be difficult to determine in terms of how it would in a forest like a healthy forest, right? In a healthy forest, you would hope that ET or that potential modification of the hydrologic cycle in a healthy forest, right? It's reducing flow rates, it's retarding the rapid response of a watershed to an extreme precipitation event. ET itself, let's think, I mean ET would keep, you know evapotranspiration is the movement of water out of the soil column into a plant canopy and then the little stomata plants open up and they lose water, that's evapotranspiration. So a healthy plant wants to, that's why they, you know, it wants to evapotranspire and I would guess that a healthy forest is going to reduce and reduce flood peaks. That's my answer to that question. Do you have any more in person questions? I just read an article where the suburb of Thornton, Colorado ran into a roadblock in building a pipeline to pump the water that they had up north down to provide Thornton and as a result they had to say that they could not have a new subdivision built or a factory built. So are you aware of studies that show the limit to growth? For example Denver Metro, is there some actual physical limitation to how much we can grow? That's a good question. I mean the, what is the doctor, Denver, yeah, one, you know, one problem is these water agencies, Denver Water, Northern Water, Thornton, Westminster, Car Springs, they all kind of act a little bit like in a silo, they all protect themselves and their water rights, right? They're all they're all nervous about what the other ones are doing. They don't play together very nicely, right? So whether or not there's a region, there was, in fact I actually participated and it was now a long time ago, 10 years ago, it's called the Front Range Climate Vulnerability Study, right? So they did all work together but they stopped with just availability, right, in the grand scheme. They didn't look, we did, I think they were all too nervous to go look like take that stuff and show what their system and the vulnerability of their system, because they kind of act again in their own self-interests. There's like the Denver Regional Council of Governments, I would guess maybe would be one organization where I think would maybe look at those kind of across these different municipalities but I haven't seen one except that one, which I could even, if you're interested, I can send you the report. And it's ironic that you should be asked that because even Denver Water has emailed me, hey, do you have that Front Range Vulnerability Study report that you did 10 years ago? Sure, yeah, they're still looking at it. But again, that study didn't answer any questions about their particular system, right? They all kind of work together and then just, okay, we'll just keep it. Oh, there's another one. Yes, I am ready. Yeah, ready. David, I was wondering what you're thinking of the El Nino pattern might lead us to expect, that's a bad word, on the Colorado River Basin. Maybe you're factoring that end of the work you do with the springs, I don't know. Yeah, and so it's not strong in Colorado, right? Mostly, right? Chris? No. You, yeah, right? Yeah, Chris. He's my atmospheric science, that's why I can turn to Chris. So it's, so I don't know, it's a good, I think it's a little bit, maybe, maybe there's, maybe 100 coins or 10 coins and you've colored, what's it dry? No, wet? Wet in Colorado? What is it? You know, yeah, it's 50-50. Not a strong, yeah, not strong. I've, Philippines on the other hand, they get, they dry out and I've had, I've had worked a little bit in the Philippines and there are, they're, they're asking that exact same question for the Philippines, but they're already seeing some drying from it. So, flip a coin, I guess. Any more questions in person? Well, I get to ask my favorite question. Oh, you were not ready for this. I did not prep you for this question, which is that if there are any students who are watching this lecture online or in here, what advice would you give them if they want to get in the area of research you're in? Yeah, that's a good question. Study, no. Okay. Yeah, you know, yeah, I mean, certainly going and studying in the hard sciences, physics or math, I say, you know, go study, go get a physics degree or a math degree. No, it's fine. You could, yeah, it's fine. This is where Dan Frank, it's fine. So, you know, for the young students, like, what are they, you know, certainly, I worked in, you know, science background, right, what we do, math and science, go, you know, go stem, right, stem. Let's just give a hand to our speaker, Dr. Yates. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today. In case you didn't notice, this is our last Explorers Series event for the year and what better to have than Dr. Yates, so I'm just very excited you all work here for our last event. Thank you all again for attending this lecture on Water Resource Management. As part of our Explorers Series, we are already planning next year. We do have an event on February 7th, so you're more than welcome to come and see that lecture. If you're interested in more NCAR first year events, check out our website for upcoming lectures and conversations, and if you want to relive some of our previous talks, all the recordings are there. This is the fun part. If you are 18 years or older, which I think most of us are, please take a moment to fill out our three to five minute anonymous survey to help us understand impact effort program and to let us know how we can improve our next event. The survey will close on Monday, November 13th. There are QR codes for the survey outside, but you can also ask a staff member if you would like to use our tablets. I hope to see you all next year for an exciting new series of Explorers event. Thank you all for coming. Let's just give Dr. Yates another hand.