Emerging Decadal Climate Information: What's the Potential for Flood Risk Management?

Climate impact predictions on decadal and regional scales will provide new information about the climate system on 5-30 year timescales. This new climate information is becoming more skillful and may be useful for flood control and many other contexts. However, climate information faces several roadblocks to use by decision makers. We undertook a study of flood control managers in central Colorado to 1) explore the potential of decadal climate information and 2) see if the same roadblocks would be present for decadal timescale climate information. During the course of interviews across the Colorado Front Range we documented reasons for using (or not using) the latest climate data which both did and did not conform with existing frameworks for the utility of scientific data proposed by Cash et al. (2002) and Dilling and Lemos (2011). In this poster we describe additional criteria for usability highlighted by flood control managers. We suggest ways to expand the frameworks to include the experiences highlighted by our interview subjects.