Drought on the North American high plains: modeling effects of vegetation, temperature and rainfall perturbations on regional hydrology
type: CreativeWork
description: Drought is a natural disaster that may become more common in the future under climate change. It involves changes to temperature, precipitation, land cover or all three variables. A high-resolution integrated hydrologic model of the High Plains explores the individual importance of each of these factors and the feedbacks between them. The model was constructed using ParFlow-CLM, which represents surface and subsurface processes in detail with physically based equations. Numerical experiments were run to perturb vegetation, precipitation and temperature separately, as well as a baseline scenario with no changes and two multi-factor scenarios. Less precipitation caused larger anomalies in evapotranspiration, soil moisture, stream flow and water table levels than did increased temperature or disturbed land cover. However, many mechanisms including lateral flow, antecedent soil moisture and scaling affected the details of model response, thus making the behavior of multi-factor runs complex.
abstract: Drought is a natural disaster that may become more common in the future under climate change. It involves changes to temperature, precipitation, land cover or all three variables. A high-resolution integrated hydrologic model of the High Plains explores the individual importance of each of these factors and the feedbacks between them. The model was constructed using ParFlow-CLM, which represents surface and subsurface processes in detail with physically based equations. Numerical experiments were run to perturb vegetation, precipitation and temperature separately, as well as a baseline scenario with no changes and two multi-factor scenarios. Less precipitation caused larger anomalies in evapotranspiration, soil moisture, stream flow and water table levels than did increased temperature or disturbed land cover. However, many mechanisms including lateral flow, antecedent soil moisture and scaling affected the details of model response, thus making the behavior of multi-factor runs complex.
author: Hein, Annette
language: eng
language: English
identifier: T 8506
date published: 2018
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:43:54Z
provider: Colorado School of Mines
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Colorado School of Mines. Arthur Lakes Library

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/11124/172337