“Regional-scale modeling in the Columbia River: From monitoring to climate change”

Bart Nijssen
Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington

The Columbia River, located in the northwestern United States with headwaters in Canada, is intensely managed for hydropower generation, irrigation, flood control, ecosystem services (particularly salmonids), navigation, and recreation. Effects of anthropogenic climate change already manifest themselves in the Pacific Northwest through reduced winter snow accumulation at lower elevations and earlier spring melt. As the climate warms, the Columbia River, whose flow regime is heavily dependent on seasonal snow melt, is likely to experience significant changes in the timing of its seasonal hydrograph and possibly in total flow volume. This presentation will discuss regional-scale hydrologic modeling applications in the Columbia River Basin from near real-time monitoring of surface hydrologic conditions to climate change studies.

Bio: Bart Nijssen is an Research Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington, where he heads the Computational Hydrology group, consisting of about 10 scientists and graduate students. The group builds tools to simulate and investigate the terrestrial hydrological cycle and uses these tools for a wide range of hydrologic research projects. We investigate the effects of climate change on the hydrologic cycle, perform near real-time monitoring and forecasting studies for drought and streamflow, simulate the interactions between the various components of the climate system in coupled regional climate models, develop and analyze large datasets, and along the way we write a lot of code that we are happy to share with others.