Susan Hubbard on water resources
From Susan Hubbard: Effects of Climate Change on Watershed Dynamics · · The Global Institute for Water Security
“The Upper Colorado River Basin provides water for one in every ten Americans and a lot of hydropower, making it an essential water tower for the world with severe ramifications for the downgradient population.”
On , Susan Hubbard, Executive Vice President of Public Affairs & Investor Relations at EXELIXIS INC, spoke about water resources during Susan Hubbard: Effects of Climate Change on Watershed Dynamics on The Global Institute for Water Security.
About Susan Hubbard
In 2016 and 2017, Susan Hubbard, then Associate Laboratory Director for Earth & Environmental Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, gave two lectures on the effects of climate change on watershed dynamics and permafrost. She stated that the Arctic is warming faster than any other place on Earth and that permafrost stores more organic carbon than all other global soils combined, twice as much as is in the atmosphere. Hubbard noted that as the active layer deepens, it could expose microbes to bioavailable carbon, potentially releasing a large pulse of greenhouse gases. She described uncertainty in how terrestrial ecosystems will evolve, with some models predicting they will become large carbon sources and others predicting they will remain carbon sinks. Hubbard discussed using geophysical methods such as ground penetrating radar and electrical resistance tomography to estimate snow thickness, active layer thickness, soil moisture, and permafrost characteristics. She reported that in ice-wedge polygon landscapes, polygon type had more explanatory power for variability in properties important for microbial activity than smaller features like polygon centers or rims. Hubbard also described a genome-enabled reactive transport watershed simulator that improved prediction of carbon export to the Colorado River by 200% compared to conventional models, and a scale-adaptive modeling approach using mesh refinement to simulate processes where they contribute to larger system behavior.