Water and climate information to enhance community resilience

Overview

Water in Minnesota is a critical cultural and natural resource, vital to our state’s recreation and tourism, industry, agriculture, and Indigenous culture and lifeways. Warmer and wetter conditions — combined with more intense and frequent precipitation events — challenge our ability to effectively manage our water resources for people, plants, and animals. This project leveraged our dynamically downscaled climate projections for Minnesota as well as USGS’ Soil-Water-Balance (SWB) model to produce information about interactions between Minnesota’s changing climate and groundwater recharge, evapotranspiration, runoff, and crop water demand.

Using modeling results, we developed narrative-based scenarios to illustrate various impacts of changes in climate and groundwater availability, as well as related adaptation interventions or solutions. The information can be used to help communities address issues that intersect both groundwater and surface water — including evaluating future irrigation needs due to long-term precipitation changes, assessing the risk of drinking water shortages for communities that rely on groundwater, and reducing impacts to Minnesota’s lakes and rivers that have connections to groundwater systems.

Access groundwater variables in MN CliMAT Explore our user's guide and data use examples

Read the full report on our updated soil water balance model

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Project partners

USGS Upper Midwest Water Science Center

Project funder

Environment & Natural Resources Trust Fund

Water and climate information to enhance community resilience

+ Project partners

+ Project funder

Project partners

Project funder