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Future Climate: Projected Extremes 1417.7 Discussion of Key UncertaintiesLarge-scale climate drivers such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the PacificDecadal Oscillation (PDO) in particular, play an important role in the winter andspring precipitation extremes (and consequently floods) over the Southwest and West.A rich body of literature shows the Southwestern hydroclimate—in particular the dailyprecipitation extremes—to be very sensitive to natural interannual and decadal variability(Gershunov and Barnett 1998; Cayan et al. 1999; Gershunov and Cayan 2003). Thus,flood risk can be affected by changes to moisture delivery processes (see, for example,Dettinger et al. 1998; Gershunov and Barnett 1998; Cayan, Redmond and Riddle 1999;Rajagopalan et al. 2000), temperature, and land surface conditions. An important uncertaintyfor the Southwest therefore is how the relevant modes of natural variability in thePacific sector (ENSO and PDO) and their combined influences on Southwestern climatemay be affected by climate change. The most predictable climate regime in the Southwestis the dry winter associated with La Niña and the negative phase of the PDO. Forthe first time in over a century, in spring 2011 this combination of natural forcing did notresult in a dry winter; instead, great snow accumulations ended the early twenty-firstcentury drought. viii The influence of climate change on the stability of teleconnections ixand the reliability of traditional seasonal climate forecasts should be investigated in futureresearch.Flooding is a result of complex interactions between the type and characteristics ofmoisture delivery, water catchment attributes, and land surface features. In a broadsense, the common mechanisms of moisture delivery―heavy winter rainfall, runoff,heavy winter snow followed by spring melt, rain-on-snow events, and summer convectionconnected with the North American monsoon system―operate in conjunction withtemperature regimes and catchment and land surface features. The key to flooding outcomesare the processes that deliver moisture to this region: an intricate choreography oflarge-scale, ocean-atmospheric climate drivers and orography (the physical geographyof mountains). xSignificant changes to flood risks during the twentieth century were observed overthe entire Western United States as a result of general warming (Hamlet and Lettenmaier2007). Winter temperature changes modify the precipitation patterns; most significantly,higher temperatures increase winter rainfall at the expense of snowfall, thus reducingspring flooding while potentially increasing winter flooding. Warm and cold phases ofENSO and PDO also strongly modulate flooding risk. For example, cold ENSO and PDOphases reduce overall precipitation in the Colorado River Basin, thereby reducing floodrisk. These insights provide a template for flood-risk changes under a warmer climate inthe twenty-first century, assuming climate change does not affect the nature or stabilityof the teleconnections climate forecasters have come to trust. This is an assumption thatneeds to be verified.Floods that cause severe property damage and loss of life in populous regions arepredominantly caused by severe precipitation events on already saturated soils. As discussedabove, the Southwest is likely to experience increased flood risk from short-durationextreme atmospheric river precipitation events. The future role of rain-on-snowevents in twenty-first-century flood regimes remains highly uncertain (Dettinger et al.2009).