CASCaDE: Computational Assessments of Scenarios of Change for the Delta Ecosystem
This is the CASCaDE Project web site. Here you will find the original proposal and supplemental material which was submitted in response to the California Bay-Delta Authority Science Program 2004 Proposal Solicitation.
The project was funded and officially began March 1, 2006.
The CASCaDE project comprises an approach for determining how multiple drivers of environmental change would interact to change ecosystems targeted for restoration by CALFED. CASCaDE is aimed not at predicting the future, as that is impossible, but at building an understanding of how the ecosystem might respond to a few plausible scenarios of change.
Design of this study is built from hypotheses that: (1) California's hydrology will change during the 21st century in response to global warming; (2) ecosystem structure and function will respond to changes in California's water supply, population, land use, sea level, constructed habitats and storage-conveyance facilities, and potential levee failures; (3) sufficient information is available to project plausible scenarios of change in each of these forcings; (2) climatic, hydrologic, hydrodynamic, water-quality, geomorphic and ecosystem processes are linked in the Bay-Delta-River-Watershed system, and thus models to project future conditions there must also be linked; and (5) strategic planning by CBDA will benefit from mechanistic, ecosystem-scale projections of future forcings and responses, posed as plausible scenarios of system change.
We are developing, modifying, and linking numerical models of key processes to explore likely BDRW responses to plausible future external and internal changes. The cascading effects of changes under these scenarios will be followed as they propagate from the climate system to watersheds to river networks to the Delta and San Francisco Bay. The resulting linked modeling system will provide a scenario evaluation capability that may be used subsequently (in follow-on projects) to assess a variety of possible management approaches to accommodating the projected changes.
Progress Reports
- 5th Semiannual CASCaDE Report, September, 2008
- 4th Semiannual CASCaDE Report, March, 2008 (cumulative)
Other Documents
- Matrix of Timescales addressed by Project Components (Excel file)
- Matrix of Products from Project Components (Excel file)
- PES/CASCaDE Meeting Agenda, January 29, 2007
- Letter of thanks to CASCaDE advisors for input at 01/29/07 meeting
- Presentations for the 5th Biennial CALFED Science Conference, Oct. 22-24, 2008
- Jim Cloern, "How Will the San Francisco Bay-Delta Ecosystem Respond to Climate Change and Continued Population Growth?", 2008 AGU Fall Meeting, December 15-19, San Francisco, CA.
- Presentations at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and USGS Workshop on Climate Change, Natural Resources and Coastal Management, January 29-30, 2009, San Francisco, CA.
- Potential Inundation due to Rising Sea Levels in the San Francisco Bay Region, Noah Knowles, 2008. Download Google Earth KML overlay.
- Delta TRIM Hydrodynamic modeling in CASCaDE, Nancy Monsen, IEP Modeling Conference, May 26, 2009.
Original Proposal
