Holistic approaches are needed to investigate the capacity of current water resource operations and infrastructure to sustain water supply and critical ecosystem health under projected drought conditions. Drought vulnerability is complex, dynamic, and challenging to assess, requiring simultaneous consideration of changing water demand, use and management, hydrologic system response, and water quality. We are bringing together a community of scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Department of Energy, and Cornell University to create an integrated human-hydro-terrestrial modeling framework, linking pre-existing models, that can explore and synthesize system response and vulnerability to drought in the Delaware River Basin (DRB). The DRB provides drinking water to over 15 million people in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Critical water management decisions within the system are coordinated through the Delaware River Basin Commission and must meet requirements set by prior litigation. New York City has rights to divert water from the upper basin for water supply but must manage reservoir releases to meet downstream flow and temperature targets. The Office of the Delaware River Master administers provisions of the Flexible Flow Management Program designed to manage reservoir releases to meet water supply demands, habitat, and specified downstream minimum flows to repel upstream movement of saltwater in the estuary that threatens Philadelphia public water supply and other infrastructure. The DRB weathered a major drought in the 1960s, but water resource managers do not know if current operations and water demands can be sustained during a future drought of comparable magnitude. The integrated human-hydro-terrestrial modeling framework will be used to identify water supply and ecosystem vulnerabilities to drought and will characterize system function and evolution during and after periods of drought stress. Models will be forced with consistent input data sets representing scenarios of past, present, and future conditions. The approaches used to unify and harmonize diverse data sets and open-source models will provide a roadmap for the broader community to replicate and extend to other water resource issues and regions.

Five of California’s ten largest wildfires occurred in 2020, with the largest complex shattering the previous record by more than 100 %. The year follows a decade containing extraordinary fire activity. Trend investigations focused on changes in human activities and atmospheric thermodynamics, while the impacts of changing atmospheric dynamics are largely unknown. Here we identify extreme weather types (XWTs) associated with historically large daily burned areas in eight Californian regions. These XWTs characterize dominant fire weather regimes varying in fire behavior types (plume-driven vs. wind-driven fires) and seasonality. 2020’s exceptional fires partly occurred during previously unrecognized XWTs, whose characteristics and recurrence intervals were largely unknown. Most of the strongly large-scale forced XWTs such as Santa Ana and Diablo events increased in frequency during the 20th century particularly in the Sand Diego and Bay Area region. These changes are likely not anthropogenically caused and predominantly due to climate internal variability. However, raising greenhouse gas concentrations significantly decrease thermal low XWTs in southern and increase them in central California. These XWTs occur during the hottest time in the year and will alter fire risk in the summer season.

A framework to enable Earth system predictability research on the subseasonal timescale is developed with the Community Earth System Model, version 2 (CESM2) using two model configurations that differ in their atmospheric components. One configuration uses the Community Atmosphere Model, version 6 (CAM6) with its top near 40 km, referred to as CESM2(CAM6). The other employs the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model, version 6 (WACCM6) whose top extends to ~ 140 km in the vertical and it includes fully interactive tropospheric and stratospheric chemistry (CESM2(WACCM6)). Both configurations were used to carry out subseasonal reforecasts for the time period 1999 to 2020 following the Subseasonal Experiment’s (SubX) protocol. CESM2(CAM6) and CESM2(WACCM6) show very similar subseasonal prediction skill of 2-meter temperature, precipitation, the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) to the Community Earth System Model, version 1 with the Community Atmosphere Model, version 5 (CESM1(CAM5)) and to operational models. CESM2(CAM6) and CESM2(WACCM6) reforecast sets provide a comprehensive dataset for predictability research of multiple Earth system components, including three-dimensional output for many variables, and output specific to the mesosphere and lower-thermosphere (MLT) region. We show that MLT variability can be predicted ~ 10 days in advance of sudden stratospheric warming events. Weekly real-time forecasts with CESM2(WACCM6) contribute to the multi-model mean ensemble forecast used to issue the NOAA weeks 3-4 outlooks. As a freely available community model, both CESM2 configurations can be used to carry out additional experiments to elucidate sources of subseasonal predictability.