UA News

Connie Woodhouse, associate professor in the School of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona, will discuss "Tree Rings and Colorado River Drought: A Message from the Past with Implications for the Future." 

The gage record for the Colorado River is barely 100 years long. While that may seem like a long span of time, the record contains just three major droughts. Are these droughts representative of the range of droughts that are possible? Should we expect more severe droughts in the future? Tree rings allow us to reconstruct a history of past river flow, going back over 12 centuries. The reconstruction of Colorado River flow shows that droughts much more severe have occurred in the past, under natural climate variability alone. In this presentation, Woodhouse will show how we develop these reconstructions from tree rings, describe the droughts of the medieval period and discuss how information from the past is relevant to the future.