Predicted specific minimum flow of small streams in the Upper Colorado River Basin based on historic flow data

Our objective was to model specific minimum flow (mean of the annual minimum flows divided by drainage area [cubic feet per second per square mile]) on small, ungaged streams in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Modeling streamflows is an important tool for understanding landscape-scale drivers of flow and estimating flows where there are no gaged records. We focused our study in the Upper Colorado River Basin, a region that is not only critical for water resources but also projected to experience large future climate shifts toward a drier climate. We used a random forest modeling approach to model the relation between specific minimum flow on gaged streams (115 gages) and environmental variables. We then projected specific minimum flow to ungaged reaches in the Upper Colorado River Basin using environmental variables for each raster stream cell in the basin. This data layer shows modeled values for specific minimum flow of each stream cell.