Building Knowledge to Support Equitable Climate Resilience in the Upper Mississippi River Basin

A changing and more variable climate increases the risk to communities of damaging hydrologic events. This means that reducing community risk requires 1) spatially and temporally relevant hydrologic predictions and 2) developing an effective community engagement strategy that centers social equity and ensures engagement that reduces the impact of hydrologic event risk for those people who are most vulnerable. This project addresses the need to understand the disproportionate flood and drought risks on marginalized communities, more effectively engage marginalized people and increase non-traditional partnerships, and improve data accuracy related to hydrologic changes in the Upper Mississippi River basin.

Our research involves two major research thrusts 1) social science research approaches and best practices to engage historically excluded community members and 2) climate and hydrological modeling to assess the changes in hydrologic variables such as streamflow. To assess the effect of climate change on future hydrologic regimes, we used a subset ensemble from NASA’s Global Daily Downscaled Projections (NEX-GDDP-CMIP6) as forcing for the operational National Weather Service (NWS) hydrologic forecasting model used in the region.

In this presentation, we will highlight initial findings of future trends in peak streamflow, baseflow, and annual water yield relevant for water resource decision-making by stakeholders and communities in the basin. We will also present a “scaling fingerprint” analysis of how observed trends in the region have responded to drivers of land use and climate change at multiple spatial scales with Bayesian parameter estimation and priors informed by synthetic catchment modeling.

We will also outline our strategy and insights to identify different communities, listen and engage given different information needs and uses, and shape our final scientific outputs to support use – both reuse by technical communities and understanding to support climate resiliency decisions by communities that face disproportionate flood risk and drought risk coupled with environmental and social injustices. Finally, we will highlight best practices for engaging interdisciplinary technical teams to create community-relevant hydrologic research.