Application of Streamflow Reconstruction to Water Resources Management - Dendroclimatology - page 234

a multidisciplinary study of the potential impact of severe sustained drought on the
Colorado River; the worst-case scenarios were framed around tree-ring estimates of
annual flow at Lees Ferry (Young 1995 ) . Partly in response to the severe 1987-1992
drought in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, the California Department of
Water Resources commissioned an updated tree-ring study of the Sacramento River,
California, with a key objective being the estimation of long-term probabilities
of low flows (Meko et al. 2001 ; Meko 2001 ) . The Salt River Project (SRP),
the third largest public power utility in the United States, and the largest water
supplier for the Phoenix Arizona region, commissioned a tree-ring study of the
synchroneity of drought in two important source runoff-producing areas—the
upper Colorado River basin and the Salt-Verde River basins, Arizona (Hirschboeck
et al. 2005 ) . To facilitate use of the results by the water resources professionals and
public, the final report, as well as basic data, were included in a Web site using
a simple 'question and answer' format ( http://fp.arizona.edu/kkh/srp.htm ). An
ongoing project, 'Enhancing Water Supply Reliability through Improved Predictive
Capacity and Response,' sponsored by the US Bureau of Reclamation, has as one
of its goals the identification of strategies for incorporating tree-ring information
in river-flow modeling for the lower Colorado River basin (Jacobs et al. 2005 ) .
Public outreach and communication, in the form of meetings and a quarterly
newsletter, are important elements of the project. Motivated by the 2002 drought in
Colorado and in response to the needs of two major Colorado Front Range water
providers, Woodhouse and Lukas ( 2006 ) tailored a network of reconstructions
based on gauges in the Colorado headwaters region and the South Platte basin.
These reconstructions were used as input into the providers' water system models to
test the ability of the system to meet demands under a broader range of hydrologic
conditions than in the gauge records alone.
Although the focus of a large number of streamflow reconstructions has been on
arid and semiarid regions or areas dependent on snow-fed water supplies in western
North America, there have been several recent efforts in other parts of the world.
These include reconstructions for Mongolia (Pederson et al. 2001 ) , and exploratory
work on the potential for hydrologic reconstructions in the Southern Hemisphere in
Argentina, Chile, and New Zealand (Boninsegna 1992 ; Norton and Palmer 1992 ) .
Streamflow reconstruction may be especially valuable in the Middle East, where
increasing population and scarce water supplies make efficient water management
essential. Application in this region is feasible, as precipitation has already been
successfully reconstructed in Jordan and Turkey (Touchan et al. 1999 ; D'Arrigo and
Cullen 2001 ; Touchan et al. 2003 ) .
Many other hydrologic metrics besides streamflow have been reconstructed. In
western North America alone, these include changes in lake levels, flood magni-
tude and occurrence, and glacier mass balance. Changes in lake level have been
inferred or reconstructed for several lakes, including Lake Athabasca, Crater Lake,
and the Great Salt Lake (Stockton and Fritts 1973 ; Meko and Stockton 1988 ;
Peterson et al. 1999 ; Meko 2002 , 2006 ) . Tree growth responses to floods have been
found to document both the frequency and magnitude of flood events. This work
was pioneered by Sigafoos ( 1964 ) along the Potomac River in the eastern United