Brad Udall

Bradley H. Udall is a Senior Water and Climate Research Scientist / Scholar at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center. His expertise includes hydrology and related policy issues of the American West, with a focus on the Colorado River. He was a co-author of a 2007 Bureau of Reclamation Environmental Impact Statement on how to incorporate climate change into future Colorado River planning studies, the first such document by Reclamation. He was also a co-author of the 2008 Colorado Water Conservation Board report 'Climate Change in Colorado'. Brad was a co-author of the 2009 and 2018 National Climate Assessments and a contributing author to the 2014 IPCC 5th Assessment. In 2017, along with Jonathan Overpeck, he wrote: “The 21st Century Colorado River Hot Drought and Implications for the Future” which attributed part of the decline in Colorado River flows to rising temperatures. In 2018, he was a co-author of “On the Causes of the Declining Colorado River Streamflows” with Mu Xiao and Dennis Lettenmaier. With Overpeck in 2020, he wrote “Climate Change and the Aridification of North America”. Brad has testified in both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives on the impacts of climate change on water resources. He has received the Climate Science Service Award from the California Department of Water Resources for his work in facilitating interactions between water managers and scientists and the Partner in Conservation Award from the Department of Interior. Brad formerly served on the American Water Works Association Research Foundation expert panel on climate change. Brad has an engineering degree from Stanford and an MBA from Colorado State University.