*** DRAFT COPY-AS OF 3/15/99 ***

After the Water Sector Workshop, the Water Resources Sector Assessment Team met to discuss the content, organization, compilation, and production of the sector's report to the National Assessment's Synthesis Team. To start, the requirements for the production of the report were summarized. The Water-Resources SAT must provide the Synthesis Team a variety of information by January 2000, addressing the four basic questions:

• What are the current environmental stresses on a region or sector?
• How will projected changes in climate variability exacerbate or ameliorate the effects of the existing regional or sectoral stresses, or introduce new stresses?
• What information is needed to provide better and more certain estimates of the consequences of climate variability and climate change?
• What strategies may help the region or sector to cope with the anticipated consequences of changes in climate, especially in ways that also will help in coping with other stresses? What opportunities exist for "win-win" or "no regrets" responses?

A draft of this report must be produced by March 1999. The final report should be written for a fairly general audience; the readership will include Congress and water managers around the country. It should tell what is known and not known about water resources. The outline of the synthesis report was derived at the Woods Hole meeting and was circulated for comment Sept. 10.

In response to the needs of the synthesis report, a list of assignments was drawn up by the Water-Resources SAT (a detailed list of those assignments is available from the SAT). Those assignments represent pieces of the problem that must be pulled together to prepare the Water Sector's report to the Synthesis Team. Those pieces include:

• The compilation of a comprehensive bibliography on the effects of climate change on water resources.
• Howard Pearlman of the USGS is summarizing 1995 water demand.
• Gerry Hansler is summarizing the concerns of water managers.
• Past watershed modeling is being reviewed by Chou at the USGS, the Pacific Institute, McCabe at the USGS, Lettenmaier at the University of Washington, Frank Quinn from the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, Schwandt at the University of Texas at El Paso, etc.
• New hydrologic models need to be developed that use the outputs from GCMs, such as CCM Plus and others.
• The major drivers of water quality and how they may be affected by climate change or variability need to be identified and described.
• Extreme events need to be investigated by evaluating the current stream flow, national stream-flow records, Tom Karl's historical precipitation records, and Bruce Hayden's work.
• Judy Meyer, Mike Sale, and Steve Hostetler will model lakes to assess ecosystem functioning and health.
• Ken Frederick is working on the socioeconomic costs of climate change.
• The Groundwater Institute is conducting a comprehensive review of the effects of climate change on groundwater.
• Aris Georgakakis at Georgia Tech is compiling a national map of soil moisture.
• A baseline scenario of population and water use is being developed to support a national reconnaissance at the eight-digit level for one GCM (Norm Rosenberg's) and three concentrations of carbon dioxide.
• We need to develop an overview of legal issues.
• We should use a variety of GCMs to estimate water runoff for the conterminous United States and compare the annual runoff predicted by the different GCMs.
• Dave Wolock and Steve Hostetler will use the Canadian Climate Model to analyze watershed outputs.

A schedule was discussed for accomplishing the tasks listed above. In the next week, one-paragraph abstracts will be prepared on each project being done, telling what is going to be accomplished. For those who want to participate in the American Water Resources Association (AWRA) symposium in Atlanta, the call for papers lays out the schedule. An outline for the water-sector report should be developed in the next three weeks. By October 1, anyone that needs climate-model data must notify Dennis Felder (felder@ncar.ucar.edu) with a list of needed data. First drafts of review and qualitative papers will be due by Feb. 15, and outlines of the modeling and quantitative papers will be due at the same time. Final papers should be finished by summer for inclusion in the report.

The next meeting of the complete SAT and A-Team will be a gathering at the AWRA meeting in Atlanta in May to set the content of the report. Members of the SAT and some of the Advisory Team will be asked to write sections of the report and to review the draft report before that meeting.

The group then discussed what outreach efforts should be attempted. The suggested actions were:

• Invite representatives from governmental, NGO, professional, and environmental-advocacy groups (including the Nature Conservancy, American Rivers, Pacific Rivers, and Riverkeepers) to meet at the Atlanta conference to give their input and feedback.
• Publish a short call for papers for the Atlanta conference in Eos.
• Identify science writers and feed them information; Lynn Mortenson at the U.S. Global Change Research Program/National Assessment Coordination Office is putting together media releases.
• We have two websites, one on the National Assessment home page and one on the USGS home page where we can post material.
• We should develop an outreach plan to contact a broad range of stakeholders.