An Integrated Assessment of Climate Impacts on the Pacific Northwest

Since 1995 the Climate Impacts Group (CIG) at the University of Washington has undertaken a NOAA/OGP funded integrated assessment of climate impacts in the US Pacific Northwest Region (PNW). In this study, the Pacific Northwest has been defined as the area including Idaho, Oregon, and Washington states and the remaining parts of the Columbia River Basin. The research team consists of UW faculty, staff, and graduate students from the UW Schools of Marine Affairs, Fisheries, and Forest Resources, the Departments of Civil Engineering and Atmospheric Sciences, and policy analysts from the Washington State Department of Ecology. The PNW assessement has revolved around assessing the potential utility of climate information about two issues: (1) natural climate varitions at seasonal, interannual, and interdecadal time scales; and (2) potential PNW climate changes brought by human-caused Greenhouse Warming. This work has focused on climate impacts and related policy response strategies in four sectors: water resources, fisheries, forestry, and coastal zone activities. The CIG approach has included both emipirically-based retrospective analyses and the use of computer simulation models. For example, the most sophisticated work CIG has done includes retrospective studies linking large scale climate variations (including the El Nino Souther Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation phenomena) to (regional) PNW climate and streamflows, using PNW climate forecasts (or future climate scenarios) as boundary conditions for a Columbia Basin hydrology model, and evaluating climate-related impacts on a variety of uses in the Columbia Basin with a reservoir operations simulation model. This approach has allowed for assessments of future climate impacts on user communities in the Columbia Basin brought by either natural (e.g. El Nino) or human caused climate changes while provided a framework for exploring the outcomes of different resource management actions.