ABSTRACT
In 2014 the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Agriculture jointly awarded a grant to a team of researchers in the Truckee-Carson basin to explore the impacts of changing future climate on snow-fed arid land river systems in the west. The winning team included climate scientists, social scientists, hydrologists, and engineers from the University of Nevada Reno, the USGS, the Desert Research Institute, Ohio University, and Precision Water Resources Engineering. The four-year research project included development of an integrated modeling framework of state-of-the-art climate models, hydrology models, system operations models, groundwater models, and economics models, including the Truckee-Carson RiverWare TROA Planning Model. The project also included a robust stakeholder engagement component to help drive the scenario development. In this presentation a brief overview of both the integrated modeling framework and the stakeholder engagement process will be given. Then a survey of the RiverWare modeling results detailing both impacts to the Truckee-Carson basin due to changes in climate, and the effectiveness of potential mitigations strategies that were proposed. The presentation will focus on how RiverWare was utilized at the end of a series of climatological and hydrological models to show basin water managers and stakeholders both how changes in climate actually affect their water resources, and how effective mitigation strategies might be.

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