Regional Hydroclimatic Changes 

As global temperatures continue to rise, Earth’s hydrological cycle is expected to be altered in drastic ways.  While global understanding of hydrological cycle changes is more well established, the changes that occur on regional and local scales are poorly understood and subject to much more uncertainty.  It is these local-scale changes that are relevant for community-scale decision makers, who must plan for changes in the availability of water resources as well as the possibility of extreme precipitation events associated with climate change. In this project, the postdoctoral fellow will use global climate models, regional climate models, and local-scale hydrological models to characterize future changes in hydroclimate in the southeastern United States. The project will focus not only on changes in mean hydroclimate, but also changes in seasonality, variability, and extreme events and the implications for those changes at the community-scale level. The fellow will bridge the expertise between global-scale modelers, who focus on understanding the large-scale climate dynamics that contribute to uncertainty in future projections of the hydrological cycle, and local-scale modelers, who understand the local-scale factors necessary to incorporate into models to provide actionable information to community-scale decision makers.