F. Water Resources
RAP has been active in developing tools for the Urban Drainage and Flood Control District's (UDFCD) ALERT flood warning system. Components were added to the CIDD display system that incorporates NEXRAD radar, ALERT rain-gage and streamflow data in real-time. This system is also capable of incorporating geographic information system (GIS) data, such as basin precipitation accumulations into the display. For 2001-2002, the UDFCD is interested in a system that can display similar data, but that is web enabled.
In conjunction with ESIG, RAP's hydrology program will participate in the extreme weather and climate events initiative. NCAR's research program involves several aspects of extreme weather and climate research, but this new program will incorporate these different strands to be better integrated and expanded. Working with ESIG, RAP's hydrology group hopes to address societal impacts of and vulnerability to extremes. The combination of complex, extreme weather events combined with land use and land cover changes as a result of both land management practices and floodplain encroachments, makes the prediction of extreme events difficult. The forecasting of flood stage of both large-scale floods and smaller-scale flash floods requires accurate estimates of precipitation both temporally and spatially. Understanding the nature of the precipitation extremes and how it interacts with the underlying topography is important.
A USEPA project, Evaluating the Effects of Climate Change and other Stressors on Aquatic Ecosystem Goods and Services in the San Francisco Bay Watershed, initiated by the xxxxx seeks to develop a framework useful for assessing the potential impacts of climate change and other anthropogenic stressors on the goods and services provided by the San Fransisco Bay Watershed's aquatic ecosystems. The effort rests upon the concept of ecosystem services, defined as the conditions and processes through which natural ecosystems sustain and fulfill human life. Aquatic services can be categorized as either hydrologic, biogeochemical or biological in nature and climate change and other existing stressors