Beatrice L Gordon

Desert Research Institute | DRI · Division of Hydrologic Sciences

Climate change‐induced shifts in snow storage and snowmelt patterns pose risks for adverse impacts to people, the environment, and irrigated agriculture. Existing research primarily focuses on evaluating these risks to irrigated agriculture at large scales, overlooking the role of local context in shaping risk dynamics. Consequently, many “at‐risk”...

Water budgets are essential for characterizing water supplies from snow‐dominated upland catchments where data are sparse, groundwater systems are complex, and measurements are prone to error (ε). One solution is imposing water budget closure (CWB) by ignoring difficult‐to‐measure variables, including inter‐basin groundwater fluxes (G) and ε. Howev...

Climate warming will cause mountain snowpacks to melt earlier, reducing summer streamflow and threatening water supplies and ecosystems. Quantifying how sensitive streamflow timing is to climate change and where it is most sensitive remain key questions. Physically based hydrological models are often used for this purpose; however, they have embedd...

Climate change is altering the seasonal accumulation and ablation of snow across mid-latitude mountainous regions in the Northern Hemisphere with profound implications for the water resources available to downstream communities and environments. Despite decades of empirical and model-based research on snowmelt-driven streamflow, our ability to pred...

Climate warming may cause mountain snowpacks to melt earlier, reducing summer streamflow and threatening water supplies and ecosystems. Few observations allow separating rain and snowmelt contributions to streamflow, so physically based models are needed for hydrological predictions and analyses. We develop an observational technique for detecting...

Agricultural water is of considerable interest to water managers and policymakers as irrigation—particularly flood irrigation—accounts for the largest portion of freshwater use. However, characterization of how and when flood applied water contributes to storage and adjacent surface water bodies via return flow remains limited, particularly relativ...

The assessment of hydrologic ecosystem services associated with flood irrigation in the western United States is particularly limited by a lack of data about return flows. Return flows, the portion of applied water that returns to adjacent surface and groundwater hydrologic systems during flood irrigation, may provide wildlife habitat, recharge aqu...

Privately owned rangelands in the western US support many ecosystem services and are threatened by financial incentives favoring conversion to housing development and more intensive forms of agriculture. Recognizing this threat, the impact investment community has identified rangeland management as a potential investing strategy to produce financia...

Green infrastructure is emerging as a holistic stormwater management strategy that can also provide multi-sector benefits. Robust demonstration of project success can help leverage the appeal of green infrastructure to different sectors and open the door to a variety of funding opportunities. Yet comprehensively assessing the performance of these n...