Using hydrologic landscape classification and climatic time series to assess hydrologic vulnerability of the western U.S. to climate.

We apply the hydrologic landscape (HL) concept to assess the hydrologic vulnerability of the western United States (U.S.) to projected climate conditions.

Heat-Related Health Impacts under Scenarios of Climate and Population Change.

Recent assessments have found that a warming climate, with associated increases in extreme heat events, could profoundly affect human health. This paper describes a new modeling and analysis framework, built around the Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program-Community Edition (BenMAP), for estimating heat-related mortality as a function of changes in key factors that determine the health impacts of extreme heat. This new framework has the flexibility to integrate these factors within health risk assessments, and to sample across the uncertainties in them, to provide a more comprehensive picture of total health risk from climate-driven increases in extreme heat.

Urban adaptation can roll back warming of emerging megapolitan regions.

Modeling results incorporating several distinct urban expansion futures for the United States in 2100 show that, in the absence of any adaptive urban design, megapolitan expansion, alone and separate from greenhouse gas-induced forcing, can be expected to raise near-surface temperatures 1-2 °C not just at the scale of individual cities but over large regional swaths of the country. This warming is a significant fraction of the 21st century greenhouse gas-induced climate change simulated by global climate models. Using a suite of regional climate simulations, we assessed the efficacy of commonly proposed urban adaptation strategies, such as green, cool roof, and hybrid approaches, to ameliorate the warming.

Estimated losses of plant biodiversity in the United States from historical N deposition (1985-2010).

Although nitrogen (N) deposition is a significant threat to herbaceous plant biodiversity worldwide, it is not a new stressor for many developed regions. Only recently has it become possible to estimate historical impacts nationally for the United States. We used 26 years (1985-2010) of deposition data, with ecosystem-specific functional responses from local field experiments and a national critical loads (CL) database, to generate scenario-based estimates of herbaceous species loss.

Variation in estimated ozone-related health impacts of climate change due to modeling choices and assumptions.

Background: Future climate change may cause air quality degradation via climate-induced changes in meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, and emissions into the air. Few studies have explicitly modeled the potential relationships between climate change, air quality, and human health, and fewer still have investigated the sensitivity of estimates to the underlying modeling choices.

Objectives: Our goal was to assess the sensitivity of estimated ozone-related human health impacts of climate change to key modeling choices.

The vulnerability cube: a multi-dimensional framework for assessing relative vulnerability.

The diversity and abundance of information available for vulnerability assessments can present a challenge to decision-makers. Here we propose a framework to aggregate and present socioeconomic and environmental data in a visual vulnerability assessment that will help prioritize management options for communities vulnerable to environmental change. Socioeconomic and environmental data are aggregated into distinct categorical indices across three dimensions and arranged in a cube, so that individual communities can be plotted in a three-dimensional space to assess the type and relative magnitude of the communities' vulnerabilities based on their position in the cube.

Climate change-related temperature impacts on warm season heat mortality: a proof-of-concept methodology using BenMAP.

Climate change is anticipated to raise overall temperatures and is likely to increase heat-related human health morbidity and mortality risks. The objective of this work was to develop a proof-of-concept approach for estimating excess heat-related premature deaths in the continental United States resulting from potential changes in future temperature using the BenMAP model. In this approach we adapt the methods and tools that the US Environmental Protection Agency uses to assess air pollution health impacts by incorporating temperature modeling and heat mortality health impact functions.

National housing and impervious surface scenarios for integrated climate impact assessments.

Understanding the impacts of climate change on people and the environment requires an understanding of the dynamics of both climate and land use/land cover changes. A range of future climate scenarios is available for the conterminous United States that have been developed based on widely used international greenhouse gas emissions storylines. Climate scenarios derived from these emissions storylines have not been matched with logically consistent land use/cover maps for the United States.