The Impacts of Climate and Irrigation Changes on Water Resources and Power Systems in the United States
Abstract
In the United States, agriculture water withdrawals (water removed from a natural source) are similar to power sector withdrawal volumes, and the sector is also the largest water consumer (evaporative use), making it central to addressing strategic food-energy-water system (FEWS) planning and management. Agriculture has varying spatiotemporal water resource demands and impacts, with implications for watershed health, crop and bioenergy productivity, electricity generation, and carbon management. Given the high uncertainties in FEWS drivers, high-performance computing capabilities could enable new and unique approaches to FEWS modeling and analysis. These include enhanced scenario scopes that encompass climate and hydrologic conditions, population growth, and non-economic rules governing water and land planning decisions. Emerging machine learning methods allow downscaling of climate and energy resource data to address FEWS impacts and interactions, while sensitivity quantification can provide insights into extreme events.
In this presentation, we will showcase a new approach for creating irrigation scenarios using Karhunen-Loève expansions, which encodes the spatial covariance patterns of historical data in the sample generation process, producing samples with appropriate spatial characteristics. The generated scenarios describe changes in irrigated lands across the US at a 10x10 km spatial resolution, which are then used as inputs to drive a hydrologic water balance and transport model (Water Balance Model, WBM) under climate changes to year 2050. Results from the hydrologic model will reveal river discharge and water availability sensitivities under these climate and irrigation scenarios. Changes in water availability, taken from the Water Balance Model, are also applied to an electricity expansion model (The Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) model) to further test whether irrigation water use may affect power system expansion decisions. The mutli-model results will demonstrate key tradeoffs across FEWS systems and opportunities for advancing the scope assessments.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMGC0410015M
- Keywords:
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- 1622 Earth system modeling;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1807 Climate impacts;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1878 Water/energy interactions;
- HYDROLOGY