Improving Stream Temperature Predictions for River Water Decision Support Systems

1. Improving Stream Temperature Predictions for River Water Decision Support Systems NOAA NMFS SWFSC Eric Danner Steven Lindley Andrew Pike Roy Mendelssohn Lynn Dewitt NASA Ames Rama Nemani Forrest Melton University of Colorado, Boulder Balaji Rajagopalan,

2. Project overview Declining salmon populations in the California Central Valley – listed under the Endangered Species Act Federal Water Projects – ESA consultation Water temperature: altered spawning habitat, water flows, climate change Need better temperature models Improve existing Decision Support System (DSS) for water allocation Make the model results readily available to the fisheries and water managers

3. Salmonid Life Cycle Temperature and Flow: migration timing Temperature: mortality, spawn timing Freshwater Flow: scour Marine Temperature: development time Ocean: distribution, growth, maturation, fecundity, survival,... Temperature: growth, survival Estuarine

5. Shasta Dam Keswick Dam

6. Shasta Dam Keswick Dam Temperature Management

7. Shasta Dam Keswick Dam Balls Ferry 57°F Compliance Pont Bend Bridge Jellys Ferry Red Bluff Diversion Dam

8. Status of the Sacramento River Chinook Status of CVP water Criticisms of the Current Operational Model

9. NOAA / NASA Project Model Increase the temporal and spatial resolution of the current temperature models: 1km every 15 minutes Add forecasting capability: 72 hours Simulations and predictions for water release scenarios, and provide modeled optimized scenarios Make results available in real-time

10. Heat Budget Based on both atmospheric inputs and water temperature atmospheric terms water temperature terms Tague et al. 2007

11. NASA Ames Ecological Forecasting Lab Integrate WRF model into Terrestrial Observation and Prediction System (TOPS) Coupled TOPS-WRF system to generate hindcasts and forecasts of weather conditions every 15 minutes at a spatial resolution of 1km2

12. System Architecture

13. Keswick Dam Redding Airport Balls Ferry

14. Keswick Dam Redding Airport Balls Ferry

16. Model Results Day of Month August 2008

17. System Integration TOPS-WRF outputs stored in NetCDF format and transferred to NOAA ERD via calls to Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP) server

21. Node, 104km maximum Anti-Node, 72km mean minimum Start, 0km Balls Ferry Jellys Ferry Bend Bridge Red Bluff Dynamic habitat management for endangered species 24-hour time series Temperature °F

22. Summary Water shortages have ESA listed species competing for limited resources The existing DSS for water allocations is significantly flawed Our model provides stream temperature estimates at high spatiotemporal scales Model is mechanistic: examine climate change scenarios User interface and data delivery system Step towards an ecosystem-based management approach Collaboration between NOAA and NASA

23. Acknowledgements NASA Applied Sciences Grant # NNX08AK72G Southwest Fisheries Science Center, Environmental Research Division