Incorporating Decadal Predictions into Water Management Decisions

Decadal climate predictions offer potential to meet decision-support and planning needs that fall between seasonal variations and centennial climate trends. As decadal prediction science advances through its current exploratory phase, there is considerable opportunity to better understand decision needs and the predictive capacity for the needed information. We will present an overview of an ongoing project, Understanding Decision-Climate Interactions on Decadal Scales (UDECIDE), that aims to understand the role of decadal climate information for water management decisions. Understanding will be developed through case studies framed around flood and drought, and potential applications to the water resources sector will be demonstrated. Specifically, we will show how a hydrologic decision model that has been used for both seasonal forecasts and climate change projections can be extended to use decadal predictions to quantify local hydrologic impacts on decadal scales. Through this case study, we will discuss the potential differences and similarities, needs and benefits, as well as remaining challenges, of incorporating decadal predictions in water management decisions.