The Desert Southwest: Oasis or Mirage?
May 10, 2012
by Pete Zrioka, Arizona State University Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development
The American West has a drinking problem. On farms and in cities, we are guzzling water at an alarming rate.
Scientists say that to live sustainably, we should use no more than 40 percent of the water from the Colorado River Basin. As it is now, we use 76 percent, nearly double the sustainable benchmark.
There are some safeguards in place against water scarcity. The reservoir Lakes Mead and Powell can provide approximately five years of average annual stream flow at full capacity for insurance against low rainfall years.
But John Sabo, an associate professor in Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences, believes that 50 years in the future – rather than five – should be the planning mark for water usage.
David White, co-director of ASU’s Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), says that Arizona water policy has done a good job of providing adequate supplies for the growth of the region up to this point. But environmental and demographic factors will likely require changes in that system. The DCDC uses research to inform environmental policy in times of uncertainty.
Read the entire article at ASU News.
Over the past 60 years, metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona, has been among the fastest-growing urban areas in the United States, and this rapid urbanization has resulted in an urban heat island (UHI) of substantial size and intensity. During this time, an uncommon amount of UHI-specific research, relative to other cities in North America, occurred within its boundaries. This review investigates the possible reasons and motivations underpinning the large body of work, as well as summarizing specific themes, approaches, and theoretical contributions arising from such study. It is argued that several factors intrinsic to Phoenix were responsible for the prodigious output: strong applied urban climate research partnerships between several agencies (such as the academy, the National Weather Service, private energy firms, and municipal governments); a high-quality, long-standing network of urban meteorological stations allowing for relatively fine spatial resolution of near-surface temperature data; and a high level of public and media interest in the UHI. Three major research themes can be discerned: 1) theoretical contributions from documenting, modeling, and analyzing the physical characteristics of the UHI; 2) interdisciplinary investigation into its biophysical and social consequences; and 3) assessment and evaluation of several UHI mitigation techniques. Also examined herein is the successful implementation of sustainable urban climate policies within the metropolitan area. The authors note the importance of understanding and applying local research results during the policy formation process.
However, the economics of water demand are not that simple. Water is used for many purposes. Water is used to meet the basic necessity of life, consumption and hygiene. Water is used to create an atmosphere that suits our lifestyles, landscapes and pools, and perhaps long hot showers. Water is used for economic gain, from creating places attractive to customers to washing silicon chips. The sale of water is also used to finance the infrastructure and costs associated with making water available to a community. Each of these water uses has its own economic dynamics based on behaviors and motivation for water use which can vary among the consumers in each category. At the same time, the economics for each of these water uses are related, changes in one can affect the other. Thus, decision making about the price of water is not as clear as it may initially appear. The goal of this climate briefing is to increase the awareness of the complexities associated with the price of water by facilitating a discussion about the differences and relationships that exist in the economics of different water uses. 
The Southwest Climate Alliance [SWCA] welcomes your comments on a DRAFT version of the "Assessment of Climate Change in the Southwest United States: A Technical Report Prepared for the U.S. National Climate Assessment".
At a White House event, the NSF Director announced a new Big Data solicitation, $10 million Expeditions in Computing award, and awards in cyberinfrastructure, geosciences, training.
We've created a Google Scholar page for Decision Center for a Desert City publications. Google Scholar provides a review of Decision Center for a Desert City literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles. Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.
The network consists of researchers at "nodes" across the US, together with several collaborating government and university labs and centers in the US and beyond. Network researchers have a collective expertise that cuts across the relevant areas of applied mathematics and climate science. They will collaboratively lead a group of postdoctoral research fellows, graduate and undergraduate students to create a cadre of strong mathematicians with the interdisciplinary expertise required to analyze problems that have their origin in climate issues.