TY - JOUR
T1 - Contribution of environmental forcings to US runoff changes for the period 1950-2010
AU - Forbes, Whitney L.
AU - Mao, Jiafu
AU - Jin, Mingzhou
AU - Kao, Shih Chieh
AU - Fu, Wenting
AU - Shi, Xiaoying
AU - Riccuito, Daniel M.
AU - Thornton, Peter E.
AU - Ribes, Aurélien
AU - Wang, Yutao
AU - Piao, Shilong
AU - Zhao, Tianbao
AU - Schwalm, Christopher R.
AU - Hoffman, Forrest M.
AU - Fisher, Joshua B.
AU - Ito, Akihiko
AU - Poulter, Ben
AU - Fang, Yuanyuan
AU - Tian, Hanqin
AU - Jain, Atul K.
AU - Hayes, Daniel J.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is supported by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Science Scientific Focus Area (TES SFA) project funded through the Terrestrial Ecosystem Science Program, partially supported by the Reducing Uncertainties in Biogeochemical Interactions through Synthesis and Computing Scientific Focus Area (RUBISCO SFA) project funded through the Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program, and partially supported by the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) project funded through the Earth System Modeling Program, in the Climate and Environmental Sciences Division (CESD) of the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) Program in the US Department of Energy Office of Science. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. JBF contributed to this from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. JBF was supported in part by NASA SUSMAP, INCA, IDS, and CARBON programs. Atul K Jain is funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF-AGS-12-43071).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd.
PY - 2018/5
Y1 - 2018/5
N2 - Runoff in the United States is changing, and this study finds that the measured change is dependent on the geographic region and varies seasonally. Specifically, observed annual total runoff had an insignificant increasing trend in the US between 1950 and 2010, but this insignificance was due to regional heterogeneity with both significant and insignificant increases in the eastern, northern, and southern US, and a greater significant decrease in the western US. Trends for seasonal mean runoff also differed across regions. By region, the season with the largest observed trend was autumn for the east (positive), spring for the north (positive), winter for the south (positive), winter for the west (negative), and autumn for the US as a whole (positive). Based on the detection and attribution analysis using gridded WaterWatch runoff observations along with semi-factorial land surface model simulations from the Multi-scale Synthesis and Terrestrial Model Intercomparison Project (MsTMIP), we found that while the roles of CO2 concentration, nitrogen deposition, and land use and land cover were inconsistent regionally and seasonally, the effect of climatic variations was detected for all regions and seasons, and the change in runoff could be attributed to climate change in summer and autumn in the south and in autumn in the west. We also found that the climate-only and historical transient simulations consistently underestimated the runoff trends, possibly due to precipitation bias in the MsTMIP driver or within the models themselves.
AB - Runoff in the United States is changing, and this study finds that the measured change is dependent on the geographic region and varies seasonally. Specifically, observed annual total runoff had an insignificant increasing trend in the US between 1950 and 2010, but this insignificance was due to regional heterogeneity with both significant and insignificant increases in the eastern, northern, and southern US, and a greater significant decrease in the western US. Trends for seasonal mean runoff also differed across regions. By region, the season with the largest observed trend was autumn for the east (positive), spring for the north (positive), winter for the south (positive), winter for the west (negative), and autumn for the US as a whole (positive). Based on the detection and attribution analysis using gridded WaterWatch runoff observations along with semi-factorial land surface model simulations from the Multi-scale Synthesis and Terrestrial Model Intercomparison Project (MsTMIP), we found that while the roles of CO2 concentration, nitrogen deposition, and land use and land cover were inconsistent regionally and seasonally, the effect of climatic variations was detected for all regions and seasons, and the change in runoff could be attributed to climate change in summer and autumn in the south and in autumn in the west. We also found that the climate-only and historical transient simulations consistently underestimated the runoff trends, possibly due to precipitation bias in the MsTMIP driver or within the models themselves.
KW - MsTMIP
KW - US runoff
KW - detection and attribution
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U2 - 10.1088/1748-9326/aabb41
DO - 10.1088/1748-9326/aabb41
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85048134423
VL - 13
JO - Environmental Research Letters
JF - Environmental Research Letters
SN - 1748-9326
IS - 5
M1 - 054023
ER -