Improving Seasonal Predictions of Climate Variability and Water Availability at the Catchment Scale

This paper by Switanek, Troch and Castro (2009) highlights using the entire field of sea surface temperatures to predict future precipitation in a river basin. The study focuses on the Little Colorado and Gunnison river basins in the Western United States. It is well known that seas surface temperatures influence ocean-atmosphere-land interactions and this coupling has been commonly used to look at the effects of specific sea surface temperature anomolies such as the El Nino SOuthern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Both the PDO and ENSO are well studied but use a broad region to identify climate prediction links for these anomalies. This current study uses broad based correlational studies to identify specific regions of correlation to look at seas surface temperature links to future precipitation in the two river basins studied. Once the correlation structure is known the authors then demonstrate that using their method results in greater predictive skill for hydrologic flows over traditional climate prediction methods.