CIROH: Building Knowledge to Support Equitable Climate Resilience in the Upper Mississippi River Basin

In 2021, the NOAA Regional Collaboration Network conducted Climate and Equity Roundables with stakeholders in regions throughout the U.S. In the Upper Mississippi River basin (i.e., Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri), some of the top needs were to understand the disproportionate flood risks on marginalized communities, more effectively engage marginalized people and increase non-traditional partnerships, and improve data and models about floods, droughts, and other changes in water resources. This project emerged from those priorities.

The goal of this project is to support stakeholder understanding of and preparation for future risks related to floods and droughts, given climate change. This project will provide new modeling results about how streamflow will change along the mainstem of the Upper Mississippi River up to 100 years in the future by combining downscaled climate projections, land use scenarios, and hydrologic models. To assess the effect of climate change on future hydrologic regimes, the team used a subset ensemble from NASA’s Global Daily Downscaled Projections (NEX-GDDP-CMIP6) as forcing for the operational National Weather Service hydrologic forecasting model used in the region. The project will showcase a novel “scaling fingerprint” analysis of how observed trends in the basin have responded to drivers of land use and climate change at multiple spatial scales with Bayesian parameter estimation and priors informed by synthetic catchment modeling. Combining these inputs, the hydrologic models will produce peak streamflow, baseflow, and annual water yield relevant to water resource decisions in the basin.

To facilitate community engagement, the team will focus on the engagement of both technical stakeholders and impacted communities that face disproportionate flood risk and drought risk coupled with environmental and social injustices. To increase the potential use of research insights and reuse of data and model output produced by the project, UMRBA is leading listening sessions with technical experts (e.g., hydrologists, planners, and sectoral decision-makers). Additionally, working with two community partners, the project will identify flood- and drought-impacted communities, listen and engage in understanding their climate resilience challenges and opportunities, and support the use of hydrologic projections in their climate resiliency decisions.

This project will result in a report on the Upper Mississippi River basin, publications, presentations/briefings, and implementation of stakeholder and community priorities to create more realistic hydrologic model predictions. In the long term, this work aims to improve the understanding, interpretation, and use of these and other NOAA forecasts in the region and empower at-risk communities with actionable information to make decisions and seek funding given their priorities to improve hazard preparedness and increase climate resilience equity.