March 10, 2005
Predicting water needs is center’s specialty
Are farmers in southeast Idaho likely to start irrigating in early May, in late May, or somewhere in between?
Private power producer PacifiCorp, for one, wants to know so it can prepare for less water being available and more power being needed when agricultural producers start pumping earlier in the year. Knowing last year, for example, that the climate was probably going to be drier and warmer than average, PacifiCorp went ahead and arranged to purchase additional power while rates were lower. The move offered the potential to save around $2 million.
It’s a dollars and cents example of using forecasts of seasonal precipitation and temperature, provided months in advance, to improve water planning and reduce the effects when there are droughts, according to Anne Steinemann, new director of the UW Center for Water and Watershed Studies.
Steinemann spoke recently on the topic of climate forecasts and water management at a public lecture, part of a series sponsored by the UW’s Earth Initiative. The final lecture in the series will be March 23 when Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich considers The Nineveh Gap: Why We Can’t Predict Political Responses to Environmental Problems (see http://www.washington.edu/alumni/activities/lectures/2005ocean.html for advance registration information).
Steinemann, whose areas of expertise include drought management, environmental planning, and the integration of forecast information into decision-making — particularly in the West, says droughts are the nation’s most costly natural disaster. While more than 35 states have plans for when they experience a drought, not many managers are taking advantage of seasonal forecasts that might alert everyone that a problem is looming, Steinemann says. This in spite of water managers who estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars per state could be saved if they knew of impending droughts, according to a survey Steinemann conducted as part of her research.
The challenges include potential users not knowing the information is there, not knowing how to use it or — in the worst case — using it incorrectly.
Overcoming such hurdles is where people such as Steinemann, researchers with the Center for Water and Watershed Studies and the Climate Impacts Group and others try to help. She says water managers need help weighing the benefits and costs of relying on climate forecasts and developing strategies to cope.
Georgia never had a statewide drought plan until after 1998–2002 when the state had the worst drought on record. Steinemann worked with more than 150 stakeholders to develop the state’s first such plan. Although everyone had access to seasonal climate forecasts, they were too complicated and many were suspicious, she discovered. She developed a system to provide climate forecasts to water managers in a format they could use and understand.
It proved itself by showing it would have correctly forecast the 1998–2002 drought in the state. Since then it has helped every March from 2001 to 2004 when Georgia has had to decide whether it should pay farmers not to irrigate the following summer. Estimates are that the state saved $100 million to $350 million in agricultural losses in drought years and saved $5 million to $30 million in wet years when the state did not offer to pay farmers not to irrigate.
In the flip side of work that’s being done, Steinemann says the UW is working on forecasts of too much water, of flooding, forecasts that tend to be predictions of shorter duration.
Applying forecasts and climate modeling to policy making crosses numerous disciplines; for example, Steinemann is a professor with appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and in the Evans School of Public Affairs. The position as director of the Center for Water and Watershed Studies, that she assumed last fall, received support from that department and school, as well as from the College of Engineering, College of Forest Resources, College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences and the UW’s Earth Initiative.
The Earth Initiative is a recently launched program to bring together faculty, students and community partners to address environmental and natural resources challenges. Among its goals is to offer a new model for faculty and students to collaborate on some of this region’s and nation’s most critical issues.
