Historic and Prehistoric Patterns of Water Use in the Connecticut River Valley: Implications for Water Resources Planning

摘要

Water supply forecasting typically is based upon instrumented records from the recent past ranging from recent year-of-record data to 30-year 'normals', and, rarely (because of the lack of records), 100-year extremes. This report examines 144 years of instrumented records at Amherst, Massachusetts, 400 years of proxy records from tree rings, diaries, newspapers, and other historical records, and the records of thousands of years of archeaological data in order to evaluate the extent to which historic and prehistoric climatic cycles might provide models for the future.