Bureau of Reclamation owns and operates hundreds of high and significant hazard dams across the western United States. Impacts of climate change, while highly variable in space and time, threaten to impact risk and performance across the portfolio. In response, Reclamation is exploring a number of different methods to incorporate climate change projections into the risk informed decision-making process. These approaches include critical collaborations between the climate science and engineering communities to assure that the most up to date science is being used in a manner appropriate for the application with an understanding of known uncertainties and limitations. The methods are designed to align with existing risk informed decision-making procedures:
-Screening for vulnerabilities -Understanding uncertainty -Implementing change
In this talk, we will highlight four efforts currently underway at Reclamation that are designed to incorporate climate projections into existing methods. By completing a variety of projects focused on different scales (basin-specific to west-wide), different hydroclimatic regions, and different technical approaches, Reclamation is looking to gain insight into the complex interactions between climate change and hydrologic risk across their management domain. Beyond interest in methodological/technical advancements, Reclamation is also supporting efforts to provide guidance to decision makers on how to assess climate vulnerabilities within a risk framework with the goal of determining if further study is necessary. Collectively, these studies demonstrate clear progress in incorporating climate change into risk informed decisions making, along with a call for continued research and development in this arena.
