Review of the Past 20 Years of Hydroclimate Data in Yosemite National Park (Poster)

The impacts of climate change are projected to be profound in mountainous, snowpack dominated regions of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Anticipated impacts include a shift in precipitation from snow to rain, increasing snow lines, higher air and stream temperatures, and shifting snowmelt and peak runoff timing earlier in the year. Such changes have implications on natural resources such as vegetation distribution, stream ecosystems and water quality, natural fire regime, wildlife abundance and diversity, and the quantity and distribution of water resources valued and stewarded by the National Park Service. Yosemite National Park, spanning elevations from 640 – 4000 m in the central Sierra Nevada Mountains is equipped with a robust network of snowpack, meteorological, and stream monitoring instrumentation, and provides a unique opportunity to examine water regime shifts over time. Data collection within the park is often a collaborative effort between park resource managers, researchers, and state agencies to satisfy multiple objectives. For park resource managers, these long-term datasets provide an opportunity to examine local weather and climate trends to better understand local climate change impacts and use this knowledge to inform resource management decisions. Presented here are long term trends in temperature and precipitation for the high elevations of the park, and trends in snowpack and streamflow timing over the past twenty years of hydroclimate monitoring within Yosemite.