Climate Change Impacts on Drought Risk and Water Security in the Delaware River Basin

A severe drought occurred in the Delaware River Basin (DRB) in the early to late-1960s that has been followed by a comparatively wet period that continues to this day. The DRB provides water for multiple large cities on the East Coast and being able to simulate the drought of record is vital for our ability to model climate change impacts on droughts in the future. The Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model was run for 11 water years at 4 km to create a high-resolution re-analysis driven dataset. This dataset will be used as reference to analyze climate change impacts on droughts in the DRB. The impact of climate change on the 1960s drought will be analyzed first in addition to how the land cover changes impacted drought conditions. Future work will include large-scale dynamic climate change effects on drought risks in the DRB by downscaling large-ensemble global climate model data. The produced datasets will provide climate inputs to stand-alone (or 'offline') hydrologic and land-process models.