Great Basin

Introduction

The Great Basin, despite popular images of unyielding aridity and lack of surface water, has a number of rivers which drain high mountain areas. These rivers support large urban areas such as Salt Lake City and Reno, as well as unique riparian and aquatic ecosystems, like the Great Salt Lake, Bear Lake, and Pyramid Lake. These mountain ranges on the periphery of and within the Great Basin also are home to extensive stands of old and very moisture-sensitive trees—primarily singleleaf pinyon pine, and also bristlecone pine, limber pine, and Douglas-fir.

So far, the great potential for tree-ring reconstructions of streamflow in the Great Basin has gone largely untapped, but that is changing as of the past several years. In the western half of the basin, Franco Biondi of the University of Nevada-Reno and his students have developed dozens of new pinyon chronologies across Nevada to use for paleoclimate reconstructions, and have done preliminary work towards a long reconstruction of flow for the West Walker River. In the northeast part of the basin, Matthew Bekker at Brigham Young University and his students have used new limber pine chronologies to reconstruct seasonal streamflow for streams draining the Wasatch Range into the Great Salt Lake.

Workshops

Two of our technical workshops for water managers and stakeholders have been held within the Great Basin, or locations immediately adjacent to it. These workshops included presentations relevant to the Great Basin. Click on a workshop below to access a summary report and the presentations; see the Treeflow Workshops page for general information about the workshops.

• Boulder City, NV - November 2008
• Salt Lake City, UT- March 2008

 

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Applications

There are many different ways to use tree-ring reconstructions in the planning and management for water resources, from educational tools to inform stakeholders about the occurrence of severe droughts, to numerical input into water supply models to test the resilience of the system under past hydrologic conditions.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) anticipates using tree-ring data (in the form of precipitation reconstructions in conjunction with groundwater modeling) in a water planning application. Plans for this work were presented by Joseph Leising of SNWA at the Boulder City, NV workshop.

The State of Utah's Drought Plan, revised in 2008, contains a chapter on "Drought from a Paleoclimatic Perspective", based on the gridded summer PDSI reconstructions developed by Cook et al. The quality of the four gridpoint reconstructions within Utah indicates the potential for reconstruction of other hydroclimatic variables, such as annual streamflow.

The TreeFlow Applications page provides summaries of other applications of tree-ring data around the West.

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