Water resource-relevant hot-dry compound events in the Western US

Across the Western US, water reservoirs with storage capacities of 1-4 years have historically ensured a robust agricultural enterprise through reservoir-fed irrigation in years of drought. Multi-year hot-dry compound events pose a risk to this system, especially in a warming climate. Reliable projections of this evolving risk require climate models to accurately simulate trends, patterns, and compound statistics of temperature and precipitation in the region. We showcase new large ensemble-reliant model evaluation techniques for compound events and how model weighting based on the results of that evaluation might affect storage projections in simple reservoir models. We also discuss possible common causes for model biases in compound temperature and precipitation behavior.