Western United States forest wildfire activity is widely thought to have increased in recent decades, yet neither the extent of recent changes nor the degree to which climate may be driving regional changes in wildfire has ...

Observations show snowpack has declined across much of the western United States over the period 1950–99. This reduction has important social and economic implications, as water retained in the snowpack from winter storms ...

Large changes in the hydrology of the western United States have been observed since the mid-twentieth century. These include a reduction in the amount of precipitation arriving as snow, a decline in snowpack at low and ...

This study examines the geographic structure of observed trends in key hydrologically relevant variables across the western United States at ⅛° spatial resolution during the period 1950–99. Geographical regions, latitude ...

Floods have been a recurring theme in California’s climatology, hydrology, and politics throughout its history. Today, California's aging water supply and flood protection infrastructures are challenged by major floods ...

This article applies formal detection and attribution techniques to investigate the nature of observed shifts in the timing of streamflow in the western United States. Previous studies have shown that the snow hydrology ...

Four dynamic regional climate models (RCMs) and one statistical downscaling approach were used to downscale 10 years of historical climate in California. To isolate possible limitations of the downscaling methods, we ...

Three statistical downscaling methods were applied to NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (used as a surrogate for the best possible general circulation model), and the downscaled meteorology was used to drive a hydrologic model over ...

It is often remarked that most of the western US (Figure 1) is “always in drought,” especially by visitors from wetter climates. The plants and landforms of the West, however, are more or less adapted to the region’s ...

California’s mountainous topography, exposure to occasional heavily moisture-laden storm systems, and varied communities and infrastructures in low lying areas make it highly vulnerable to floods. An important question ...