Upper Missouri Basin

Introduction

The Upper Missouri Basin extends from its vast headwaters in the mountains of Montana and Wyoming, across those two states, the Dakotas, and Nebraska, to the confluence of the Missouri and Platte Rivers near Omaha. (The Platte River Basin, which is technically part of the Upper Missouri basin, is treated separately in TreeFlow.)

As one moves north along the eastern slope of the Rockies into Wyoming and Montana, trees tend to be less moisture-sensitive than to the south. This makes the development hydroclimatic reconstruction more challenging, although robust reconstructions of annual streamflow are still feasible. While there are no streamflow reconstructions for the mainstem upper Missouri, reconstructions of headwaters rivers in the southwestern part of the basin have recently been developed (see map and list below). There is good potential for additional streamflow reconstructions.

In 2003, Graumlich et al, published a reconstruction of annual streamflow for the Yellowstone River at Corwin Spring, MT. However, the reconstruction model uses as predictors tree-ring reconstructions of the SOI (Southern Oscillation Index) and PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation). While SOI and PDO are linked to hydroclimatic variability in the upper Missouri Basin, it is not clear that these teleconnections are stable over long time frames, so the Graumlich et al. reconstruction should be considered an experimental work.

Basin Map

Workshops

While none of technical workshops for water managers and stakeholders have been held within the Upper Missouri Basin, many of the presentations on data and applications are still relevant to that 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.

 

^ return to top of page

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.

A just-completed study by the US Bureau of Reclamation and its partners used tree-ring reconstructions of water-year precipitation and streamflow, to generate alternative planning hydrologies that included blends of observed and paleo data, and climate change projections. One of the two case study basins was the Upper Missouri (Missouri River at Toston, MT). For more information about this study, contact Jim Prairie, Reclamation.

See the TreeFlow Applications page for descriptions of applications of tree-ring data from other basins around the West.

^ return to top of page