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Connie Woodhouse and Gregg Garfin were singled out for their collaborative work with water managers and climate scientists in California.

By University Communications
October 9, 2007

Two University of Arizona scientists are among five people to receive the first-ever Climate Science Service awards, presented by the California Department of Water Resources.

Connie Woodhouse, as associate professor in the UA department of geography and regional development, and Gregg Garfin, from the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth, were honored at the Climate Change Water Adaptation Summit sponsored by water resources department and the Water Education Foundation. The awards recognize academic assistance on planning for climate variability and change.

Woodhouse has worked on several Department of Water Resources projects, using tree-ring data to reconstruct records of streamflow and precipitation that extend hundreds of years into the past.

“These records are useful for water resource management because they allow events in the gage record, like the recent drought, to be assessed in a broader context than allowed by the relatively short gage records,” Woodhouse said.

“Many managers are considering whether the instrumental gage record is an adequate baseline for planning, and the paleohydrologic records help that assessment. In planning for the future, projections from models contain a lot of uncertainties, so some water managers feel more comfortable using the broader range of natural hydroclimatic variability in the reconstructions as a basis for planning than the model projections,” she said.

Woodhouse also has collaborated with Department of Water Resources scientist Jeanine Jones to help inform water managers about the existence and usefulness of extended records from tree rings. She has written articles on paleoclimatology and reconstructions of streamflow, on the climate of the Colorado River basin, and one, soon to be published, on drought.

She and her research assistant, Jeff Lukas at the University of Colorado, developed a Web site, California TreeFlow, which features tree-ring data and hydroclimatic reconstructions for California, and targets water managers.

Garfin is director of outreach for Institute for the Study of Planet Earth and an investigator with the Climate Assessment for the Southwest, known as CLIMAS, a division of the institute. CLIMAS is one of eight Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments programs currently funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Program Office.

“The significance of the California Department of Water Resources' Climate Science Service award is that it recognizes the value and payoff of NOAA and the UA's investment in programs like the Climate Assessment for the Southwest,” Garfin said.

“These programs have worked tirelessly for years to link climate science, scientists and research results with the people who use those results to help make more informed decisions. The award is not so much a testimony to any personal achievement as it is recognition of the importance of an entire enterprise that translates science to make it useful and usable by stakeholders like California DWR. NOAA has been a visionary in promoting this type of enterprise," he said. The UA "excels at this through programs like its forward-thinking Cooperative Extension, the NSF-SAHRA Center, BIO5 and others."

In its work with the Department of Water Resources and others, CLIMAS investigators have helped write a layperson's guide to climate change in the Colorado River Basin. They also are working to reconcile differences between climate models and projections for the Colorado River, and with the California department on initiatives with the National Integrated Drought Information System, as well as a range of other projects.