Introduction

Special Section on Climate Change and Water Resources: Climate Nonstationarity and Water Resources Management
Jose D. Salas, M.ASCE
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Emeritus Professor, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, CO 80523.

Balaji Rajagopalan, M.ASCE

Professor and Associate Chair, Dept. of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, and Fellow, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), Univ. of Colorado, UCB 428, Room ECOT 549, Boulder, CO 80309.

Laurel Saito, M.ASCE

Associate Professor, Dept. of Natural Resources and Environmental Science, and Director, Graduate Program of Hydrologic Sciences, Univ. of Nevada Reno, Mail Stop 186, Reno, NV 89557 (corresponding author). E-mail: lsaito@cabnr.unr.edu

Casey Brown, M.ASCE

Assistant Professor, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Univ. of Massachusetts, 12B Marston Hall, Amherst, MA 01003-9293.

DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)WR.1943-5452.0000279 Over the past three decades, hydrologists and water resources specialists have been concerned with the issue of nonstationarity arising from several factors. First is the effect of human intervention on the landscape that may cause changes in the precipitationrunoff relationships at various temporal and spatial scales. Second is the occurrence of natural events such as volcanic explosions or forest fires that may cause changes in the composition of the air, the soil surface, and geomorphology. Third is the low-frequency component of oceanicatmospheric phenomena that may have significant effects on the variability of hydrological processes such as annual runoff, peak flows, and droughts. Fourth is global warming, which may cause changes to oceanic and atmospheric processes, thereby affecting the hydrological cycle at various temporal and spatial scales. There has been a significant amount of literature on the subject and thousands of research and project articles and books published in recent decades. Examples of human intrusion on the landscape are the changes in land use resulting from agricultural developments in semiarid and arid lands (e.g., Pielke et al. 2007, 2011), changes caused by large-scale deforestation (e.g., Gash and Nobre 1997), changes resulting from open-pit mining operations (e.g., Salas et al. 2008), and changes from increasing urbanization in watersheds (e.g., Konrad and Booth 2002, Villarini et al. 2009). These intrusions change hydrologic response characteristics such as the magnitude and timing of floods. In many situations, current systems and management practices will be ill equipped to cope with such changes unless adjustments are made. Large-scale landscape changes such as deforestation in the tropical regions can potentially alter atmospheric circulation patterns, and consequently affect global weather and climate (e.g., Lee et al. 2008, 2009).

Major natural events, such as the volcanic explosion of Mount St. Helens in 1980 or the El Chichon volcanic explosion of 1982 induce a shock to the climate system in the form of global cooling that continues for several years. These events can also affect global circulation. Low-frequency climate drivers of the oceanic atmospheric system such as the El Nio/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), and Arctic Oscillation (AO) modulate global climate at interannual and multidecadal time scales. These drivers are the main sources of nonstationarity in global climate and hydrology. Large numbers of papers documenting the effect of these drivers on global hydroclimatology continue to emerge (e.g., Dilley and Heyman 1995; Mantua et al. 1997; Enfield et al. 2001; Akintug and Rasmussen 2005; Hamlet et al. 2005). In addition to climate variability and change due to the previously mentioned factors, anthropogenic warming of the oceans and atmosphere because of increased greenhouse gas concentrations and the ensuing changes to the hydrologic cycle are topics of serious pursuit. The international scientific community is making strides in understanding the potential warming and its effects on all aspects of climate variability [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007], but the impacts on the hydrologic cycle remain debatable and inconclusive (e.g., Cohn and Lins 2005; Legates et al. 2005; Hirsch and Ryberg 2011). Based on analyses of the global mean CO2 (GMCO2) and annual flood records in the United States, no strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with GMCO2 increases were found (Hirsch and Ryberg 2011). Although general circulation models have had success in the attribution of warming global temperatures to anthropogenic causes, their credibility and utility in reproducing variables that are relevant to hydrology and water resources applications is less clear. For example, the IPCC Report for Latin America acknowledges that the current GCMs do not produce projections of changes in the hydrological cycle at regional scales with confidence. In particular the uncertainty of projections of precipitation remain high : : : That is a great limiting factor to the practical use of such projections for guiding active adaptation or mitigation policies (Magrin et al. 2007; Boulanger et al. 2007). A variety of methods exist that address the concern of nonstationarity in hydrological processes and the topic remains an active research area. For example, in watersheds in which increasing urbanization has been documented causing significant effects in the flood response and magnitude, watershed modeling has been utilized to estimate the possible changes in the flood frequency and magnitude. Frequency analysis methods also have been applied when the parameters (or the moments such as the mean and variance) of a given model (e.g., the Gumbel model) may vary with time (e.g., Strupczewski et al. 2001; Clarke 2002). In addition, the role that low-frequency components of the oceanic atmospheric system (represented, for example, by large-scale oscillations such as ENSO, PDO, and AMO) have on extreme events such as floods has been recognized. These large-scale forcing factors have been shown to exert in-phase and out-of-phase oscillations in the magnitude of floods, mean flows, and droughts

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(e.g., Jain and Lall 2000; Franks and Kuczera 2002; Sveinsson et al. 2003; Mote et al. 2003). Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to address nonstationarity, including flood frequency distributions with mixed components (e.g., Waylen and Caviedes 1986; Rossi et al. 1984; Salas et al. 1990), flood frequency models embedded with trend components (e.g., Strupczewski et al. 2001; Clarke 2002; El Adlouni et al. 2007), flood frequency modeling considering shifting patterns (e.g., Kiem et al. 2003 and Sveinsson et al. 2005), and flood frequency modeling considering covariates (e.g., Katz et al. 2002; Clarke 2002; Griffis and Stedinger 2007). Also, multicentury variability of climatic information has been incorporated into paleoflood frequency analysis techniques (e.g., Stedinger and Cohn 1986 and Frances et al. 1994). In addition, stochastic approaches have been developed to deal with nonstationarities to simulate, for example, monthly and yearly hydrologic processes such as streamflows (e.g., for drought studies and designing reservoirs) using both short memory models such as shifting mean models and regime-switching models that have features of nonstationarity (e.g., Boes and Salas 1978; Thyer and Kuczera 2000; Sveinsson et al. 2003; Akintug and Rasmussen 2005) and long memory models such as fractionally differenced autoregressive integrated moving average (e.g., Montanari et al. 1997) and fractional Gaussian noise (Mandelbrot 1971; Koutsoyiannis 2002). The effects of long-term climatic fluctuations on the dynamics of wet and dry periods also have been incorporated through the development of paleo reconstructions of streamflows (e.g., Cook et al. 1999 Biondi et al. 2008). The field of stochastic hydrology has expanded in past decades to accommodate both stationary and nonstationary features of hydrologic regimes. These stochastic models and approaches are capable of representing a wide range of hydroclimatic variability including year-toyear and multidecadal variability, and have been quite useful in practice for generating alternative hydrologic scenarios that may occur in the future (e.g., Sveinsson et al. 2003 and Koutsoyiannis 2011). In addition to these advances in dealing with nonstationarity in hydrologic processes, climate research has identified and developed a number of tools and products for dealing with a changing climate that may be useful for addressing various societal needs including water resources. In particular, advances in projections of future climate from global circulation models (GCMs) have been an active area of research. However, such projection approaches have several constraints that must be taken into account. Chiefly, they provide information at a coarse spatial and temporal scale, and they are better at capturing global circulation features rather than regional or precipitation and temperature at a location. This has necessitated downscaling tools to translate coarse-scale GCM outputs to the local scale that is needed for water resources decision making. Clearly, this adds another layer of uncertainty to the information in addition to all the attendant uncertainties in the GCM projections. This puts decision makers in a conundrum; on the one hand, they wish to make planning decisions on the basis of the GCM projections, but on the other hand, the significant uncertainties in the information is problematic for confident decision making. This dilemma is well articulated in an aptly titled recent paper by Kundzewicz and Stakhiv (2010)Are climate models ready for prime time water resources management applications, or is more research needed? Kundzewicz and Stakhiv (2010) suggest that more research is needed in reducing climate uncertainties before GCM outputs can be used effectively for adaptation planning and design. However, Dessai et al. (2009) argue that the accuracy of climate predictions is limited by fundamental irreducible uncertainties arising from limitations in knowledge of the underlying physical processes, the chaotic nature of the climate system,

and from human actions. Furthermore, Trenberth (2010) predicts that the uncertainty of the climate predictions and projections in the next IPCC assessment report (due in 2013) will be much greater than in previous reports. Thus, the water resources community is confronted with a new paradigm in which a suite of valuable information has become available (i.e., observed data, reconstructed paleodata, GCM projections, downscaled results, and hydrologic model outputs), but they all involve various degrees of uncertainties. Water resources planners, managers, and consultants must deal with the difficult task of instituting robust management policies with uncertain information. Literature abounds with papers that discuss the outputs from global climate models, the approaches to downscale this climate information to regional scale hydrology, and the applications of various physically based and statistical models for estimating the hydrologic quantities needed for decision making. However, there is less literature on risk-based decision making and adaptation of vulnerable water systems considering the effect of uncertain information, although in the last few years a number of suggestions have been made for developing and implementing robust designs and policies that accommodate uncertain information (e.g., Dessai and van der Sluijs 2007; Brown et al. 2009; Stakhiv 2011). It is clear that the world is warming, and despite the shortcomings for estimating its effects, water planners and managers need to consider what is known and uncertain and make decisions (e.g., Wiley and Palmer 2008; McKinney et al. 2011). Rogers (2008) cautions against choosing mitigation over adaptation in managing for climate change, stressing the need to keep the focus on what is known and the scientific basis of that knowledge when making decisions to adapt to climate change. Techniques need to be developed concurrently on the use of uncertain information in water resources management. This is the motivating view for this special section. To this end, this special section of the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management focuses on providing tools and example implementations that can be used by water resources planners and decision makers to adapt to climate variability and change. Thus, papers in this section demonstrate to water resources managers and practitioners the utility of tools that can take in uncertain climate information for robust decision making in all aspects of water resources management (e.g., quantity, quality, and demand). Nine papers have emerged from the review process to form this special section. The papers in the section cover the following range of topics: (1) How to make water resources systems operations and management decisions in a changing climate (Miller et al. and Ray et al.); (2) understanding the effect of climate change on population and consequently on flood management (Kollat et al.); (3) how to view uncertainty in climate science and water utility planning and the tools that can combine the two (Barsugli et al.); (4) managing stream water quality for healthy aquatic life in a warmer world (Thompson et al.); (5) managing irrigated agriculture amid climate uncertainty (Meza et al. and Vicua et al.); and (6) incorporating climate change information in water quality management (Towler et al. and Johnson et al.). These topics cover a broad range of water resources management issues, including both quantity and quality, and will therefore be of interest to a wide audience of researchers and practitioners.

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Acknowledgments
Partial funding was provided to the first and third authors from P2C2: Multi-Century Streamflow Records Derived from Watershed Modeling and Tree Ring Data, National Science

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Foundation ATM-0823480. We also would like to thank Professor R. Palmer for his important suggestions and editing of this article.

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