Waves from a powerful storm crash into the seawall at Depoe Bay, Oregon. (Photo: Erica Harris, Oregon State University)

If you love big surf, go to Depoe Bay on the Oregon coast during a winter storm. As swells rise and break offshore, winds whip ocean spray high into the air, but the waves move inexorably toward the harbor (the “world’s smallest navigable harbor,” reads a road sign), channel through rocks and, with a resounding shudder, launch a geyser over Hwy. 101. Enthralled tourists standing along the seawall sometimes yelp as they get a cold shower.

It all makes for good fun, but the pounding water carries a warning. Data from offshore buoys indicate that the largest waves are getting bigger. Coupled with slowly rising sea levels and the occasional El Niño, when warm waters pile up along our shores (as much as 19 inches higher than normal, due to thermal expansion), storms are eroding West Coast beaches and undermining bluffs at an increasing rate.

Examples of damage aren’t hard to find. In 2010, a series of El Niño storms “eroded the beaches to often unprecedented levels at sites throughout California and vulnerable sites in the Pacific Northwest,” said coastal geologist Patrick Barnard in a U.S. Geological Survey news release. Damage to a highway lane south of San Francisco cost $5 million to repair.

In 2006, residents of Gleneden Beach found their homes tottering on the edge of a cliff when a weekend storm removed nearly 20 feet of shoreline. In nearby Oceanside, during the El Niño of 1997-98, a 32-home development at The Capes was threatened by collapse of the bluff on which it stood. In southern Oregon during that winter, a storm breached dunes and destroyed Port Orford’s sewage treatment plant drain field. California coastal communities reported more than $100 million in property damage.

In the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Barnard and other West Coast researchers, including Peter Ruggiero of Oregon State University and Jonathan Allan of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), raised the likelihood of increasing erosion risk in a changing climate and added: “If these trends continue, the combination of large waves and higher water levels, particularly when enhanced by El Niños, can be expected to be more frequent in the future, resulting in greater risk of coastal erosion, flooding, and cliff failures.”

While beaches wax and wane seasonally in a complex dance between land and sea, recent erosion losses have left some Oregon communities more vulnerable to the next storm. DOGAMI’s beach monitoring program has shown that in Tillamook County, beaches have not recovered from the 1997-98 El Niño. They have eroded landward an average of 30 to 60 feet and, in some areas, up to 150 feet. Rockaway Beach alone has lost an estimated 2.5 million cubic yards of sand. At Neskowin, beach retreat has enabled storm waves to threaten homes, flood streets and undermine rock-reinforcement — a.k.a. “rip rap” — in front of the dunes.

Wrestling with Risk

“Neskowin is at the head of the pin in terms of coastal erosion in Tillamook County. The community wishes to be proactive in addressing this problem,” says Mark Labhart, chair of the Neskowin Coastal Hazards Committee and a Tillamook County commissioner. “OSU research papers and direct access to professors have been invaluable in providing factual data on what has been happening in the past and what we might expect in the future so the community, the county and the state can plan for the next steps.”

Waves crawl up against the lower level of a structure in Neskowin, Oregon, during a storm in January, 2008. (Photo: Armand Thibault, Neskowin)

At stake, he adds, are property values, roads, state park facilities and the relaxed quality of life for which the Oregon coast has become famous. Neskowin’s quiet, family-oriented character has lured vacationers for more than a century. According to local historical documents, Sarah Page and her husband settled on what was known as Slab Creek in the 1880s. She opened the first post office and called it Neskowin after she heard a Nestucca Indian refer to the creek by that name, meaning it had plenty of fish.

Today, the community has 408 homes (less than a quarter of which are occupied year around), a golf course and a condominium development, the Proposal Rock Inn. Nestled against Cascade Head to the south, Neskowin mirrors much of coastal Tillamook County, which has the highest percentage of second homes of all the state’s shoreline counties, according to the Oregon Coastal Zone Management Association (OCZMA).

Dedicated to protecting this idyllic enclave is a local group appointed by the county commission in 2009. The Neskowin Coastal Hazards Committee is composed of property owners and local and state officials and facilitated by Pat Corcoran, a coastal hazards specialist with Oregon Sea Grant. It has met with Ruggiero, Allan and other scientists. It has reviewed options (known as “Hazard Alleviation Techniques” or HATs) for reducing erosion hazards. With Corcoran’s help, it identified emerging research and delved into erosion processes and trends.

Working with Mitch Rohse, a planning consultant from Salem, the committee published a proposed legal policy in 2011 for counties to deal with the mounting risks: Adapting to Coastal Erosion Hazards in Tillamook County: A Framework Plan. Local planners and the county planning commission must review the document before it goes to the county commission for approval. Concurrently, the committee has raised more than $27,000 from private contributors, the Neskowin Homeowners Assn. and the Oregon Dept. of Land Conservation and Development for an engineering analysis of options and costs to protect the shoreline.

A first for Oregon, the draft framework plan calls on the county to adopt policies that help communities reduce their vulnerability to storm damage and erosion. Reflecting current state and local regulations, it draws from a variety of scientific sources, including former OSU master’s student Heather Baron’s 2011 thesis, in which she focused on “coastal hazard zones.” For her degree in Marine Resource Management, she evaluated the probability of erosion in each zone for 18 different climate change scenarios. Each scenario reflects a combination of risk factors: sea level rise, extreme wave heights and El Niño frequency and intensity. Her work builds on research by Ruggiero, Allan and their colleagues, who have used beach, wave and landscape data to define such zones along the Oregon coast.

If the plan were approved, properties in each zone would be subject to standards that reflect their vulnerability to the risk of future storm damage. Neskowin committee members expect that idea to generate debate over issues from development rights to property values. “Any time you put colored lines on a map that potentially affect property values, you get people’s attention in a hurry,” says Labhart.

Coastal Change

The threat faced by Neskowin and other communities doesn’t arise over night. It grows gradually from a series of seemingly harmless events, chief among them the construction of homes and condos and the seawalls that protect them. “A recent storm may have washed away a beach or destroyed homes lining the shore,” wrote retired OSU coastal oceanographer Paul Komar in The Sciences in 2000, “but merely blaming the weather is simplistic. Almost always, subtle factors have been acting over time to weaken the coast and make it more susceptible; the storm, when it comes, simply delivers the coup de grâce.”

Waves pound a beach and structure between Depot Bay and Boiler Bay on the Oregon coast. (Photo: Erica Harris, Oregon State University)

Neskowin’s case is puzzling, says Komar. When he started investigating erosion problems in the 1970s, Neskowin homeowners had problems with too much sand building up the dunes, blocking ocean views and even threatening to bury homes. “The change to erosion began with the 1982-83 El Niño and accelerated during the ‘one-two punch’ of the 1997-98 El Niño and storms of the following winter,” he says. Today, he adds, the community is a “classic example of ‘hot spot’ El Niño erosion. Normally during the next few years following an El Niño winter, we expect the beach sand to be carried back to the south by the ‘normal’ waves, but this has not happened yet at Neskowin, and it’s not clear why it hasn’t.”

Over the last decade, with support from Oregon Sea Grant and agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists have been zeroing in on those subtle factors. Basic questions motivate them: How do coastal systems work? How do currents carry sand onto and off a beach, piling it up in some years and draining it away in others? Is sand accumulating on the coast or moving permanently into the deep ocean?

Just as importantly, they are providing communities like Neskowin with the knowledge to reduce property risks in the future. “We’re getting great data about the Oregon coast now. Compared to what we had 10 or 15 years ago, the observational data we have today are like night and day,” says Onno Husing, executive director of the OCZMA.

Citizens, elected officials and policymakers can see those data at the click of a mouse. Researchers regularly profile beaches from Gold Beach to Astoria and publish charts that show present and past sand heights relative to mean low and high water levels (see “Beach and Shoreline Mapping” at www.nanoos.org). They monitor wave heights and wave “run-up” on beaches. They estimate future flood risks and how many homes, roads and businesses are in harm’s way. And they meet with citizens to share the results.

Although the broad direction of changes over at least the last decade is clear, Ruggiero emphasizes that uncertainty casts a shadow over the likelihood that any home or community will suffer damage in the future. The range of estimates for climate change only adds to the difficulty of forecasting future risk.

Speaking of just one factor, increasing wave heights, he says: “Attributing it to climate change is very difficult. I don’t do that, but the bottom line is that the waves have increased over the last several decades, and that could be for a variety reasons. Any time you look way out into the future, uncertainty is huge.”

What is certain is that big waves will continue to hit the West Coast and attract sightseers to places like Neskowin, Rockaway and Depoe Bay. How coastal communities will adapt is an open question.

_______________________________________

Read a National Academy of Sciences report, Sea-Level Rise for the Coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington: Past, Present, and Future (2012)

Three Sisters in the Oregon Cascades (Photo: University Marketing)

That’s what happened in early November 2006, says OSU geoscientist Anne Nolin. On virtually every Cascade peak from Mt. Rainier in Washington to Mt. Hood in Oregon, a “perfect storm” of driving rain, balmy temperatures and receding glaciers sent torrents of rock and mud tearing downhill.

“It was raining almost to the top of Mt. Hood,” recalls Nolin, an internationally known expert in mountain hydroclimatology. On her laptop, she clicks open a photo of Mount Hood with one of her graduate students standing beside a jumble of debris that had spewed out of Eliot Creek into a grove of evergreens during the storm, which dumped over 13 inches of rain on Mt. Hood in 36 hours.

“This area used to be soft forest duff,” Nolin explains, pointing to the photo. “Now it’s full five feet in boulders and logs.”

Collecting data with sophisticated technologies (satellites, lasers and computer models), as well as traditional methods (boots on the ground), Nolin is leading an investigation that will more fully describe the forces energizing alpine debris flows.

“There’s an enormous amount of sediment up there — pyroclastic debris from volcanoes, till ground up by glaciers,” she says. “Once it’s no longer held in place by the ice, it becomes unstable. Add water, and these unstable sediments are mobilized.”

The study, supported by more than $350,000 in National Science Foundation (NSF) stimulus funds, also will help foresters, park managers and mountain communities better predict events like the 2006 deluge, which washed out bridges, swept away campgrounds, closed roads and set the stage for future floods by choking river channels.

Pineapple Express

Snow is Nolin’s medium. Practically born with skis on her feet, she has plied the slopes from Killington Mountain in Vermont, near where her family has a home, to Mt. Hutt in New Zealand, where she spent three and a half months of her 2009-2010 sabbatical. The other eight months she lived (and skied) in the Vaud and Valais regions of Switzerland. (The Northern and Southern Hemispheres together gave her back-to-back winters — something only a lifelong snow lover would deem delightful.) While overseas, she gave a flurry of presentations about debris flows, as well as conferring with fellow researchers at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and the University of Zurich.

The Cascades will see more rain, less snow and changing water flows as climate shifts precipitation patterns, says Anne Nolin of OSU’s Dept. of Geosciences. In addition to analyzing debris flow risks, Nolin focusing on snowpack and water availability in the McKenzie River Basin. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

All of these scientists are seeing the same thing on their local mountaintops: a steady nibbling away of glacial edges. Satellite images of Hood and Rainier show glaciers shrinking by 14 percent between 1987 and 2005, Nolin reports. That’s a loss of nearly 1 percent ice volume per year.

It is at this ragged glacial edge, where ice is fragmented and meltwater is leaking down the ultra-steep terrain of towering peaks, that most debris flows begin. Nolin and her team are trying to pin down the triggering mechanisms. One culprit could be the so-called Pineapple Express — those notorious storms nicknamed for the warm temperatures and monsoon-like quantities of rain they bring from their origins in the tropical Pacific. They are examples of “atmospheric rivers” — airborne water plumes that shoot extraordinary amounts of vapor through the atmosphere. Nolin describes them as “laser beams of moisture,” which blast into the Northwest from time to time, including the 2006 storm that ranked as the decade’s worst.

“We’re trying to understand the character of these storms and their impact on mountain sediments,” she says. “Basically, we want to know how climate change affects rain-induced debris flows in the Northwest and other mountain regions worldwide.”

After Year One of the three-year study, Nolin and her team of colleagues and graduate students have found a clear link between debris flow events and unusually high freezing levels — the elevation where precipitation falls as snow instead of rain.

“The freezing altitudes of nearly all the storms that caused debris flows are at least one standard deviation higher than other significant rainfall events occurring in the same season,” Nolin writes along with her co-investigators Stephen Lancaster, an OSU geomorphologist, and Gordon Grant, a courtesy professor from the U.S. Forest Service, in their annual report to NSF. “Further, nearly all debris-flow events were coupled with … atmospheric river-like conditions.”

Yet because of the complex interplay of mountain systems, storm dynamics and debris-flow mechanics, Nolin says, “the conclusive story continues to elude us.”

Upslope, Downslope

“Water flows downhill, but policy flows uphill,” Nolin told members of the international Mountain Research Initiative in Perth, Scotland, last fall.

On the “upslope-downslope continuum,” it’s the big population centers in the valleys and on the coasts that pass the laws and set the agendas for timber harvest, land use, energy resources, air quality, water allocation and just about everything else that affects the highlands, she explained.

Policy isn’t the only thing that rises. Greenhouse gasses produced by cities and by fossil fuel users in the lowlands have caused temperatures to rise in the mountains. Research reveals that this warming is altering the foothills and forests of Oregon’s Cascades in measurable ways. Spring is arriving a full month sooner than it did 50 years ago in some parts of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Nolin says, citing the research of OSU atmospheric scientist Christoph Thomas. Winters’ final frosts, he found, are falling ever earlier on the calendar. Water levels in the McKenzie River are dropping. Lower elevation snowpack — accumulated layers of snowfall that build up and compact during the winter — is disappearing.

“When snow melts earlier, we lose water storage,” says Nolin. “Snowpack is a reservoir for us.”

In Oregon’s Hood River Valley, 50 to 80 percent of the water that irrigates crops comes from Mt. Hood’s glaciers and snowpack. If early melting trends continue, that priceless meltwater is in danger of dwindling by early- to mid-summer, leaving farmers in short supply during the hottest months when they need it most.

“Climate change,” Nolin says, “disproportionately affects mountain regions.” One reason is found in the physical properties of light and frozen H2O — properties she studied along with satellite remote sensing as a Ph.D. student at U.C. Santa Barbara. After having previously worked as a soil and water scientist, she became entranced by the elegant physics of light interacting with ice particles.

“Soil and snow are both particulate, porous substances,” she says. “But snow is so much more simple and clean. Radiative transfer theory is a very straightforward way to monitor snow from satellites.”

In fact, the glittering white of snow and ice is what explains the vulnerability of mountains to climate change. Whiteness, Nolin explains, reflects sunlight back into the atmosphere. As light-reflecting snowcaps and ice sheets shrink, more sunlight gets absorbed into the earth instead of bouncing off.

Melting accelerates as ever more light and heat are captured and held. Scientists call this phenomenon the “ice-albedo feedback.” As a vicious cycle, it causes temperatures to actually rise faster in ice-laden places than elsewhere on the planet.

Those ice-laden places include the North Atlantic island of Greenland, where as an early-career scientist, Nolin spent several summers studying polar climatology.

“It’s flat and white as far as you can see,” she recalls. But if that sounds like a complaint about the frozen landscape, she quickly sets the record straight. “It glitters,” she says. “It’s very pretty.”

On the Web: See more about OSU’s Mountain Hydroclimatology Research Group.

Illustration by Alex Nabaum

As we grow up, we have new experiences. We learn something we didn’t know before. We consider others. Make discoveries. Make mistakes. We fail and we succeed. In 1964, representatives of the United States and Canada ratified a treaty relating to the cooperative development of the water resources of the Columbia River Basin. They didn’t know what we know now.

The Beginning

There’s a river up in the Northwest that winds around mountains and rolls down valleys. Across flood plains and through wetlands, it slips like nature’s long wet tongue searching for the salt of the Pacific Ocean. Narrow and noisy at its headwaters in the Canadian Rockies, the river widens, slows and quiets as it drops south and west. It hides its energy deep, but this is a masquerade, not a natural act.

Nearly every drop of the Columbia River, the most powerful river in North America, is controlled from a dark fifth-floor room of a marble building in Portland, Oregon. I know. I’ve been there.

In between my first and second year of graduate school I was offered a fellowship with the weather and stream-flow forecasting group at the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA). The offer came after I presented a conference poster on the implications of climate change for current snow measuring techniques in the Columbia River Basin. In faded Levis and a wool sweater, my hair unbrushed, I stood in front of a group of agency administrators, academics and executives and spoke: “It appears we’re headed for trouble. Under a range of warming scenarios our current measurement locations may likely be unreliable. Basically, we won’t know what we have, so we won’t know what we’re going to get.”

I was referring to our understanding of climate-driven changes in snow accumulation at elevations above 4,500 feet and how associated spring runoff would affect the hydrology and water availability within the Columbia River Basin. Turns out that’s a bit of a hot button topic, and a week later the lead hydrologist at BPA called and offered me a slot with his group.

I’m for fish, diverse alternative energy portfolios, constrained growth, clean water, big winters, crunchy Northwest culture and wild rivers. I’m against dams, energy trading, big developments, suits and some days, the federal government. I almost turned him down, but I had strong encouragement from Anne Nolin, Oregon State University associate professor in geosciences, and Aaron Wolf, department head for geosciences and an international expert on transboundary waters.

I signed on the line.

Click for larger image. Map by Gavin Potenza

Utilized for Maximum Benefit

The Columbia River Basin is the fourth largest river basin in North America. It covers more than 259,000 square miles and spans the international border between the United States and Canada. It is one of the most heavily developed rivers in the world in terms of hydroelectric power, capable of generating more than 21 million kilowatts of energy.

The first hydroelectric dam on the Columbia River was completed in 1933 at Rock Island, Washington. With almost double Rock Island’s generating capacity, the Bonneville Dam, located 40 miles east of Portland, followed in 1937. Four years later, both were dwarfed by Grand Coulee Dam, which had more than six times the generating capacity of Bonneville. A run-of-the-river dam (it uses natural flow, not a large reservoir, to generate power), Bonneville was designed with fish ladders to allow for the migration of native anadromous fish species. Grand Coulee, constructed as a storage reservoir, was not. These dams were the beginning. Twelve other major federal dams in the Columbia River Basin followed on the main stems of the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Another 400 dams were built in the smaller reaches and tributaries. The primary purpose of these structures: flood control, hydropower and irrigation.

The Columbia River is about 1,200 miles long from headwaters to mouth. If all the dams in the Columbia Basin were lined up on the main stem, there would be a dam roughly every three miles. Their operation and management falls to three entities in the United States: the Bonneville Power Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation.

“The infrastructure on the Columbia has created many benefits, such as power generation, flood control, irrigation, navigation and recreation, but it has been to the detriment of the fish population and aspects of the ecosystem, and it has resulted in the displacement of communities and indigenous cultures,” says Lynette de Silva, associate director for OSU’s Program in Water Conflict Management and Transformation.

Since development of the Columbia River began, human use and reliance on the system have increased. In the last 60 years, population and per capita income have tripled across the Northwest, and irrigation, hydropower and flood control have experienced significant growth.

Wolf, a leader in a university consortium to reconsider the Columbia’s future, notes that communities are becoming more dependent on the river. At the same time, factors such as climate change, demographic shifts and degrading infrastructure will challenge the management abilities of federal and state agencies. At stake are domestic needs, fisheries, ecosystems and recreational opportunities, which are becoming major economic drivers across the basin.

A Lot Can Change in 46 Years

In 1964, the United States and Canada ratified a slight, 20-page document. The Treaty Between the United States of America and Canada Relating to the Cooperative Development of the Water Resources of the Columbia River Basin created the operating system for the Columbia River dams and the division of the power benefits. It led to the construction of three large storage dams in British Columbia, which are used for downstream flood control and power generation at the lower run-of-the-river dams.

For the last 46 years, the treaty has guided the cooperative management of the river for flood control and hydropower. Today, these are still important areas of focus and management; however, new issues have emerged.

During the drafting and implementation of the treaty, the environment and cultural and ecological health were not primary issues. The treaty focused on development of hydropower and on flood control for the mutual benefit of the two countries and has been extremely successful in those two areas, says Barb Cosens, an associate professor at the University of Idaho Waters of the West and College of Law. She notes that it was negotiated at the national and provincial levels with minimal public involvement. Today, she adds, communities on both sides of the international boundary have far greater capacity to demand a voice in the future of the basin.

In many ways the treaty is operating in the manner for which it was designed, says Cosens. There are issues, however, that were not recognized in the original treaty and that may now need to be addressed. Examples include in-stream ecosystem services (fisheries, water quality and endangered species habitat), cultural practices and recreation. Provisions in the treaty allow for either the United States or Canada to call for its termination after September 2024 with a minimum 10-year notice. As a result, 2014 has become a target for stakeholders and interested parties who seek to evaluate the treaty.

A formal opportunity for individuals and agencies to suggest changes to the treaty was largely absent during its initial drafting. That is no longer the case.

Revelstoke Dam. Located on the upper Columbia River and constructed in 1984, the dam forms Lake Revelstoke, a reservoir stretching for nearly 80 miles. The concrete hydroelectric gravity dam has an installed capacity of 1,843,000 kilo watts and is owned and operated by British Columbia Hydro. --- Image by © Christopher Morris/Corbis

A Consortium on Columbia Basin Governance

In spring 2009, with input from a consortium of five universities, the University of Idaho convened a symposium (Transboundary River Governance in the Face of Uncertainty: The Columbia River Treaty, 2014) in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Cosens organized the meeting with colleagues from OSU and the universities of British Columbia, Washington and Montana. Their purpose is to help inform future treaty negotiations by determining some of the scenarios and outcomes that might influence Columbia River Basin decisions.

They explored questions about governing an international watercourse in the face of uncertainties: social and economic instability, climate and environmental change, continued regional population growth, a threatened and deteriorating ecosystem, demand for non-fossil fuel energy and deteriorating infrastructure. In one room, they brought together the dam operators, electricity generators, fishers, irrigators, wind surfers, policymakers, scientists, engineers and native people with deep ancestral roots. “The potential for new conversations is exciting,” says Wolf. “We’re bringing together people from all over the basin to create the future of the river.”

The second symposium — scheduled for November 2010 at Oregon State University in Corvallis — will address three key themes: needs and benefits, participatory processes and transboundary governance mechanisms.

This Land Is Our Land

Ultimately the federal governments of the United States and Canada determine the state of the Columbia and its governance, including whether or not to re-open the treaty for negotiation. While I was working at the Bonneville Power Administration, Anthony White (OSU B.S., Mathematics, ‘67), the secretary to the U.S. Entity for the Columbia River Treaty, regularly reminded me that the Columbia is an international navigable waterway subject to the authority of the State Department and other federal agencies. Withdrawals for municipal and farming purposes generally fall under state control. In many ways, White was right, but the river is much more than that.

The Columbia River is my river. It’s your river. Your children’s and your parents’. It’s the river of the salmon and the alder. The sturgeon. Snails. Douglas fir. Beaver. Osprey. Eagle. It’s our river. By coming together as a University Consortium on Columbia River Governance, OSU and its partners are helping to make sure all our voices, and all our concerns, are heard and explored using the best research available.

Editor’s note: For an announcement of recent scenarios completed for basin planning, see a Nov. 10, 2010 news release from the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. The Bonneville Power Administration and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintain a website on treaty evaluation.

Terraced rice fields in Vietnam and other tropical countries could be at risk if monsoon rains shift south. A research team including OSU geoscientist Ed Brook has reported evidence of such shifts in the distant past. See NASA's global vegetation map here. (Photo: iStockPhoto.com, Mark Weiss)

At times in the distant past, an abrupt change in climate has been associated with a shift of seasonal monsoons to the south, a new study concludes, causing more rain to fall over the oceans than in the Earth’s tropical regions, and leading to a dramatic drop in global vegetation growth.

If similar changes were to happen to the Earth’s climate today as a result of global warming — as scientists believe is possible — this might lead to drier tropics, more wildfires and declines in agricultural production in some of the world’s most heavily populated regions.

The findings were based on oxygen isotopes in air from ice cores and supported by previously published data from ancient stalagmites found in caves. They were published June 12 in the journal Science by researchers from Oregon State University, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Unexpected Consequences

The data confirming these effects were unusually compelling, researchers said.

“Changes of this type have been theorized in climate models, but we’ve never before had detailed and precise data showing such a widespread impact of abrupt climate change,” said Ed Brook, an OSU professor of geosciences. “We didn’t really expect to find such large, fast environmental changes recorded by the whole atmosphere. The data are pretty hard to ignore.”

The researchers used oxygen measurements, as recorded in air bubbles in ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland, to gauge the changes taking place in vegetation during the past 100,000 years. Increases or decreases in vegetation growth can be determined by measuring the ratio of two different oxygen isotopes in air — the composition of which is essentially the same around the world at any one point in time.

Ice to Rock

They were also able to verify and confirm these measurements with data from studies of ancient stalagmites on the floors of caves in China, which can reveal rainfall levels over hundreds of thousands of years.

“Both the ice core data and the stalagmites in the caves gave us the same signal, of very dry conditions over broad areas at the same time,” Brook said. “We believe the mechanism causing this was a shift in monsoon patterns, more rain falling over the ocean instead of the land. That resulted in much lower vegetation growth in the regions affected by these monsoons, in what is now India, Southeast Asia and parts of North Africa.”

Fast Times

Previous research has determined that the climate can shift quite rapidly in some cases, in periods as short as decades or less. This study provides a barometer of how those climate changes can affect the Earth’s capacity to grow vegetation. (See a NASA map of Earth vegetation zones here.)

“Oxygen levels and their isotopic composition in the atmosphere are pretty stable; it takes a major terrestrial change to affect it very much,” Brook said. “These changes were huge. The drop in vegetation growth must have been dramatic.”

Impacts on Food

Observations of past climatic behavior are important, Brook said, but not a perfect predictor of the impact of future climatic shifts. For one thing, at times in the past when some of these changes took place, larger parts of the northern hemisphere were covered by ice. Ocean circulation patterns also can heavily influence climate and shift in ways that are not completely understood.

However, the study still points to monsoon behavior being closely linked to climate change.

“These findings highlight the sensitivity of low-latitude rainfall patterns to abrupt climate change in the high-latitude north,” the researchers wrote in their report, “with possible relevance for future rainfall and agriculture in heavily-populated monsoon regions.”

Doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to lower average winter precipitation in Northwestern Oregon, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

You can’t just walk into the data center in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS). The sign on the door says you need a pass card. There should be another sign too: Caution, planetary experiments in progress. Inside, computer clusters churn 24/7, spinning out information about ocean currents, winds, air temperatures, ice sheets and flows of energy. Lights blink and fans drone as they cool the machines that run calculations on command from scientists who may be just down the hall or on another continent. In this case, proximity doesn’t matter.

Andreas Schmittner‘s office is a 30-second walk from the data center, but the CEOAS assistant professor doesn’t have to go there to check on his experiments. From his desk, he logs on to his Linux computer cluster at the center and reviews the status of 20 or more projects that he may have running simultaneously.

Schmittner is an oceanographer who devotes himself to climate models, those mathematical descriptions of the real world that allow scientists to envision possible sea levels, ice sheets and temperature and precipitation patterns on a warmer planet. Grounded in physics and tested against real data from the past, climate models range from the simple to the complex. Think of them as alternative futures.

“Models should be regarded as 
tools to understand the climate system better and to address research questions,” says Schmittner. “Depending on the research question you have, you use different tools. Just like in your workshop, if you need to screw something down, you don’t need a wrench. You use a screwdriver.”

In short, models have become the high-tech workhorses of climate science. Scientists rely on them to consider how coastal communities, food and water supplies, forests and weather would fare on a changing Earth.

More than 20 years ago, OSU researchers created models to study global atmospheric circulation and the Pacific Ocean system known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Today’s models are more sophisticated and the goals more ambitious: to make them more realistic (aligned with actual climate data), to incorporate all significant processes and to identify the uncertainties that inevitably affect modeling outcomes.

With better models come results that illuminate how the world may change in coming decades. In a report published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles that generated headlines in 2008, Schmittner showed that even if greenhouse gas emissions increase gradually until 2100 and are then virtually eliminated by 2300, the planet would continue to warm for the next 200 years or more.

In 2005, he and colleagues in Europe and North America reported that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (now about 35 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution) could affect the North Atlantic with steep plankton declines and a 25 percent slowdown in currents that carry heat toward Europe. Actual observations based on water temperature and salinity suggest that currents may actually be slowing, but scientists are still debating what the data mean. “We have to get more observational data and improve our models,” Schmittner told the BBC.

An Uncertain Future

Moderate increases in average winter temperatures occur in Washington and Oregon when carbon dioxide is doubled in the atmosphere, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

Future scenarios amount to potential conditions in a changing world, not to firm predictions. “We can’t say exactly how much warmer the climate is going to be in 50 years,” says Karen Shell, an assistant professor in CEOAS. “Part of that is uncertainty in the science and how we translate the science into the models. You can’t take every single cloud and put it into a model. We don’t have the computational resources to do that.”

Shell came to OSU in 2008 from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. She studies variations among the two dozen or so global circulation models used by the international climate science community. In the course of her work, she downloads so much data that she has generated calls from OSU network technicians. “They were concerned that my computer had been infected by a virus,” she says.

Data from modeling runs and from the field (including satellites, ocean buoys and monitoring stations on the polar ice sheets) are a modeler’s bread and butter. They contain clues about what drives the climate system over long periods of time. Shell and her colleagues analyze how models treat factors such as solar energy flows at the top of the atmosphere (how energy is absorbed and reflected) and the distribution of atmospheric water vapor from the equator to the poles.

“If you can figure out what’s causing the spread (among model results) and link that to satellite data, you can get clues about cause and effect,” says Shell. “That’s how you make progress. It’s slow progress, but it has to be done.

“I love what I do,” she adds, noting that model results provide important information for responding to the likely consequences of climate change.

Bringing It Home

Less summer precipitation in Eastern Washington and parts of Oregon could occur if carbon dioxide doubles in the atmosphere, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

Over the past two decades, models have improved in both scope (how many physical and biological processes they incorporate) and resolution (the grid or spatial density of a region). They enable researchers to look at what might be in store for Klamath Basin water supplies or for forest fire risks in the western United States. Hydrologist Steve Hostetler has worked on such regional issues for about 20 years for the U.S. Geological Survey. The courtesy professor in the OSU Department of Geosciences continues to work on current and past climate conditions with colleagues at the USGS, OSU and the University of Oregon.

“It’s very collaborative with lots of different ways of looking at things, lots of different types of expertise. I seldom do things on my own,” he says.

In 2006, the National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate Program supported this network with five-year grants totaling $3.3 million to OSU and partners at UO and the University of Minnesota. The goal is to develop a detailed picture of climate change from ocean records, ice core samples, terrestrial cave formations and global climate models.

In the late 1980s, Hostetler was doing fieldwork for the USGS when he became interested in paleoclimate, focusing on trends over the last 50,000 years. Since then, he has used the results of global and regional atmospheric models to estimate how climate influences water balances and fire frequency in the West.

For the Klamath Basin, modeling can improve the accuracy of multi-year evaporation estimates, Hostetler has reported. Evaporation is critical for determining how much water is available from year to year. Under a changing climate, accurate predictions will be necessary for resolving the region’s legendary water disputes.

In 2006, Hostetler and two USGS scientists co-authored the Atlas of Climatic Controls of Wildfire in the Western United States. For the period 1980-2000, their maps show how fires were closely linked with monthly water and energy balances in eight ecoregions, including the coastal and interior Pacific Northwest. Their report could lead to better predictions of wildfire risk.

“A lot of modeling is really mundane, boring stuff. But when you complete something and can look at the results and interpret what’s going on, that’s the payoff. These maps are the payoff,” Hostetler says.

Mining the Data

Doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to increased summer temperatures across Oregon, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

Behind the doors at the CEOAS data center are the information systems that make such results possible. “We have the networking, computational and storage infrastructure to move large amounts of data,” says manager Chuck Sears, who salts conversation with talk of “terabytes” (one terabyte equals a million million data points) and “arrays” (large tables of data).

Models aren’t the center’s only source of data. Continuous streams of information from satellites, ocean buoys and other monitoring systems flow into the center’s databanks, enabling scientists to test and to refine their models. And since maps and other visual displays enhance communication among scientific teams and with the public, the center offers state-of-the-art visualization systems as well.

“We’ve created a production studio,” says Sears, “and we’ve enabled 2,000 different devices to be connected outside the center, as if they were in the center. These devices range from desktop computers to handheld devices such as iPhones.”

Increasingly, collaborative climate science is being done in remote offices and at meetings and other locations, not on the premises of computing centers. “Ultimately you have to get all of those data out for real work,” says Mark Abbott, dean of CEOAS and member of the National Science Board. “It’s going to be personalized and local. You’ll be able to get to it everywhere. The key is the balance between what’s in the center and what’s out on your desktop, your PDA (personal desktop assistant) or what you have in your home.”

Access to a variety of such devices allows scientists at CEOAS to act like symphony conductors, Abbott adds, orchestrating the different tools they need. “If you’re a real woodwinds expert, you just use that, but if you really want to use some other instruments, you can do that too.

“Supercomputer centers do great things,” he adds, “but the excitement is out on the edges,” where scientific teams are sharpening our views of a changing planet.

For more about climate modeling at OSU:

Philip Mote to Lead Oregon’s New Climate Research Institute, January 6, 2009

New Study: Long-Term Global Warming May be Tough to Reverse, February 25, 2008

Research Team to Explore Past Climate by Looking for Triggers to Rapid Change, June 28, 2006

Atlantic Current Shutdown Could Disrupt Global Ocean Food Chain, April 5, 2005

To support research in the College of Earth, Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, contact the OSU Foundation

In small Moroccan villages, tea and food accompany discussion. The topic here was water use. OSU water specialist Aaron Wolf (second from left) interviewed Hammou Magdoul (left), a farmer in Ameskar el-Fouqani, with help from his interpreter, Mohamed Zaki (right). (Photo courtesy of Aaron Wolf)

In the summer of 1997, Aaron Wolf and a Berber guide trekked up narrow mountain paths to a village high in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Despite the steep terrain, they walked lightly. A donkey carried their gear. As they moved toward snowcapped peaks, they crossed one dry, rocky ridge after another. It took four days for them to reach the M’Goun Valley, elevation 7,000 feet. Their destination was two villages: Ameskar el-Fouqani (upper) and Ameskar al-Tahtani (lower), two communities of mud and stone buildings set among irrigated hillside terraces.

The small spring-fed stream that flows through the villages is vital to the hundred or so families who live here. It serves their homes, powers a grain mill and waters crops and gardens. There is just enough water to meet their needs, but people have arranged to share the stream, doing in a microcosm what nations that divide rivers, lakes and groundwater aquifers do on a grand scale. It was a desire to learn about how a village manages competing demands — through rules that have ancient origins, predating 20th-century European colonization and the rise of an independent Moroccan government — that brought Wolf to this part of the world.

Arid communities with strong links to the past have useful lessons for a thirsty planet, believes Wolf, a water resources specialist and professor in the OSU Department of Geosciences. Traditional arrangements hold practical advice for countries with growing populations and increasing development pressures.

Funded by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Peace, Wolf’s visits to the Berber villages and later to the Bedouin camps of Israel’s Negev Desert documented rules that have worked successfully for centuries. For example, arrangements to share water are often based on time instead of amount. (In one case, families set their irrigation schedules according to when a mountain shadow crosses a stream.) This principle equitably distributes the risk of low-flow conditions during drought years. More typical throughout the world, including the United States, is allocation by volume, which allows some water users to have priority, regardless of how much is available from year to year. In case of drought, other users must do with less or go without.

In Berber communities, water irrigation intakes may be built with stones but not with concrete, guaranteeing a flow of water to downstream users. Following Islamic law, people in both societies do not sell water. Access for drinking is a fundamental right, although making use of canals, pipes and other infrastructure may carry a price tag.

When disagreements occur, they are brought before a locally appointed judge. Enforcement can be swift, Wolf recalls being told. Asked about how long one party to a dispute had to agree to a judge’s decision, the judge replied by wetting his finger and holding it in the wind. “He said that if there was not agreement by the time his finger was dry, he would see to it that the man’s house would be burned to the ground,” Wolf says.

Politics and Databases

Wolf has built a career around assembling global water-related information and expertise, watershed by watershed. In his Ph.D. work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he focused on the Jordan River Basin in the Middle East, applying the theory of alternative dispute resolution to create a framework for decision-making. Water, he says, may be the single most important focus for continuing dialogue among Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and other groups.

Under the leadership of Director Michael E. Campana, the IWW coordinates water-related teaching and research and applies OSU expertise to the water resources needs of Oregon citizens. More than 80 OSU faculty members in six OSU colleges conduct water-related research, supported by more than $11 million in annual grant funding.

On the Internet, see water.oregonstate.edu.

“If you just talk about the politics, you end up banging your head against the wall. There is no way to move. Every word has 5,000 years of meaning,” says Wolf. “But if you think about the things that are related to this (water), you can find other ways to talk. . . . In my dissertation I set out to capture how water had played a role in the Arab-Israeli conflict over time. And found much to my surprise, because it wasn’t in the literature, there is a rich, rich history of cooperation and dialogue.”

Despite the breakdown of the peace process, he says, multilateral discussions about water continue to this day. The issue is one of personal interest to Wolf who, as a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen, was drafted and served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces from 1986 to 1988. That experience, described in his book, A Purity of Arms, instilled in him a deep desire for finding ways to resolve conflict through peaceful means.

In addition to the Jordan, he has worked with organizations to improve management on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, the Salween in Southeast Asia and southern Africa’s Okavango, the “jewel of the Kalahari.” Around the world, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Water development projects are key to social and economic progress, affecting agriculture, energy production, social relations and public health. Inadequate investment already has a staggering cost. The United Nations estimates that more than 1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water and that up to 5 million people, mostly children, die annually of water-related diseases. Some observers have suggested that water wars will haunt the future. “Water supplies are falling while the demand is dramatically growing,” warned Koichiro Matsuura, director general of UNESCO, in 2005.

While Wolf sees access to clean water as a formidable unmet challenge, he disagrees that water disputes will inevitably escalate into wars. It’s not that tension and conflict are absent from water management, he says. Rather, research by him and his students has found that cooperation over water — the kind of traditions exhibited by the Berbers and the Bedouins — is far more common than violence. In scouring historical records and cataloging modern decisions, they have found reference to only one “water war,” which occurred in the Tigris-Euphrates basin about 4,500 years ago. In the last 50 years, nations have signed 400 water-related treaties while 37 disputes involved violence, 27 of those between Israel and its neighbors.

In fact, their research suggests that, far from being an inducement to war, water management can be a pathway to peace. Cooperation over some of the world’s largest rivers — the Nile, the Mekong, the Indus — has succeeded in the face of ongoing hostilities and contributed to productive relationships that make violence less likely.

Building the basis for those relationships, however, is hard work. Wolf and his colleagues have made a start. At OSU, where he is affiliated with the Institute of Water and Watersheds (IWW), Wolf spearheaded creation of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu), an online library of agreements, case studies and events around the world. It includes maps showing the physical, social and economic circumstances that guide water-related decisions in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America. OSU faculty members in the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering (www.nacse.org) built the digital engine that drives the database.

To people struggling with water-related disputes, the database provides invaluable tools. “No matter where you work, people always think they are the only ones facing these issues. Water pollution, upstream/downstream relations, water rights. They’re so relieved just to hear that other people have tackled them,” Wolf says.

“There’s no blueprint for solving conflicts from one basin to another. There are best practices. We’ve done a pretty good job of assembling them. And there are lessons — trends — where basins evolve over time through stages.”

To help people apply those lessons and develop their own practices, Wolf helps to lead a group known as the Universities Partnership for Transboundary Waters. Currently, it includes experts from 14 universities on five continents. “People are grappling with these issues all over, and I want to see continued interaction between Oregon and the rest of the world. We have a lot to teach, and we’ve got some stuff to learn. I think it’s useful to foster a sense of community around this,” Wolf adds.

A recent example of such community-building endeavors focused on Africa. Together with colleagues at the African Water Issues Research Unit at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, Wolf produced an assessment of hydrologic risks and institutional abilities to address them in the continent’s 63 international river basins. The United Nations Environment Programme published their report in 2005, the first of five such continental-scale analyses.

That report has given a boost to people working on water resources management, says co-author Anthony Turton of the University of Pretoria. He credits Wolf with shifting the world’s attention from water as a source of conflict to one of cooperation, with particular relevance for Africa. “I am grateful that he (Wolf) gave Africa a voice,” says Turton. “His project allowed us to speak on behalf of Africa and present some facts with which to counter the prevailing ‘Afropessimism.’ For that, many Africans are grateful.”

“Hydropolitical Resilience”

Key to the ability of countries to cooperate over water problems is a concept that is central to research by Wolf and his colleagues — “hydropolitical resilience.” The term refers to the expertise and resources that organizations need to adapt to changing environmental and social conditions. Countries need both the technical know-how — engineers, scientists, experts in public health and natural resources policy — and ways to integrate the views of people whose lives are at stake — farmers, fishermen and business people. Among these parties, skilled facilitators play a crucial role by guiding negotiations that can be contentious.

To meet these needs, Wolf and his colleagues are building on OSU’s legacy of expertise in water science and engineering. The Water Resources graduate program offers students science, engineering and policy tracks. And a new program in Water Conflict Management and Transformation includes a graduate-level professional certificate for people to be trained in the principles and practices of conflict resolution.

“When you ask people in the water field what skills they wish they had more of, (they point to) how you dialogue, how you listen, how you identify common interests. Technical people are very good in many places, but they need people who can run these processes more efficiently,” says Wolf. “I see us being a training ground for anyone working in water.”

He also sees Oregon’s water management experience as a model for others. “Our watershed councils are doing cutting-edge work in terms of local management and local participation. Power really is vested in the local community.” With funds from the U.S. Geological Survey and IWW, Wolf and OSU sociologist Denise Lach are documenting the successes of Oregon’s local councils in resolving conflicts.

Respecting local knowledge and values can make all the difference, he adds, in the midst of a competition for resources. “You see it a lot in native systems. There’s a balance of equity and honor. In a Bedouin land court, I heard a judge tell someone (who won a case), ‘You’re right, but he (his opponent) still needs a livelihood for his family. Can we think of a way to make sure he still has his minimum needs taken care of?’”

Water management, Wolf and his colleagues stress, is conflict management.

• Aaron Wolf’s Web page
• OSU Department of Geosciences
• College of Science
• OSU Institute of Water and Watersheds
• United Nations Environment Programme
• U.S. Institute of Peace
• National Science Foundation
• U.S. Geological Survey
• Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database

For more information about OSU’s international water research:

• Water Conflicts in Africa Strain Political, Economic Systems (OSU press release 12-5-05)
• OSU Role Expanding in Managing World Water Conflict (OSU press release 3-20-03)
• Water issues solvable in Israeli-Syrian peace talks (OSU press release 1-25-00)

Where It Rains in Oregon

OSU researcher Chris Daly created PRISM, a unique spatial data analysis tool, to map climate parameters such as precipitation and temperature with great precision. See maps generated by PRISM showing precipitation in China and in Oregon (PDF).

Two OSU scientists have produced the first collection of maps that show climate, soil characteristics and plant species suitability for the People’s Republic of China. Their China atlas is the result of 10 years of research and has paid off by increasing grass exports from Oregon to the world’s most populous nation.

The 296-page atlas, Visualizing China’s Future Agriculture: Climate, Soil, and Suitability Maps for Improved Decision Making, was compiled by David Hannaway and Chris Daly. Hannaway is a forage crops specialist in the Department of Crop and Soil Science, and Daly, a climatologist in the Department of Geosciences, directs an OSU climate mapping group.

Land managers in China are interested in forage grasses to support livestock production and to control soil erosion problems on rangelands. They also want turf grasses to beautify their cities and suburban areas.

Hannaway and Daly worked with the Oregon Grass Seed Council to evaluate turf, forage and conservation plants for use in China and to determine the market potential for Oregon-grown grass seed. Before 1992, Oregon sold no grass seed to China. In 2003, Oregon growers exported to China more than 14 million pounds valued at $8 million to $10 million.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the State of Oregon, Daly and Hannaway conducted applied research, educational demonstrations and workshops throughout China. Both faculty members are part of the OSU China Working Group, a cooperative effort between OSU and the People’s Republic of China to identify mutually beneficial research and education projects and programs.