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Climate Change and the Water Cycle Richard Harding Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
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Drivers of Global Change: Increasing population Increasing water consumption Land cover/use change Increasing greenhouse gases
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Stern Review (2006 )
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Water Consumption - after Shiklomanov 2000 2500 3000 19001920194019601980200020202040 Consumption, km 3 /year Agriculture Industry Municipal needs Reservoir Total Assessment Forecast
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Areas of physical and economic water scarcity (IWMI, 2006)
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We represent the earth by a grid of squares, typically of length 150 km or smaller. The atmosphere and oceans are divided into vertical slices of varying depths. To predict the future we need the climate models
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FIGURE SPM-6. Relative changes in precipitation (in percent) for the period 2090–2099, relative to1980–1999. Values are multi-model averages based on the SRES A1B scenario for December to February (left) and June to August (right). White areas are where less than 66% of the models agree in the sign of the change and stippled areas are where more than 90% of the models agree in the sign of the change. IPCC 2007
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Smoothed annual anomalies for precipitation (%) over land from 1900 to 2005; other regions are dominated by variability. Land precipitation is changing significantly over broad areas Increases Decreases
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Climate change scenarios – the changing seasons UK winter Wetter: Up 10% by 2020s, up to 30% by 2080s Drier: 20% by 2020s, up to 50% by 2080s UK summer
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Climate change scenarios – changing extremes
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Percentage change in flows for the 20- year return period Climate change scenarios – impact on flows
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10km Glacier melt in the Himalayas 1989 2000 1978 1996
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SAGARMATHA: Snow and Glacier Aspects of Water Resources Management in the Himalaya %change in decadal mean flow for Ganges from regional climate model output (RCM2) http://www.nwl.ac.uk/ih/www/research/SAGARMATHA/
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The WATCH Integrated Project: 25 European partners: hydrology, climate and resource scientists 13m euros of effort International programme research, workshops, training, dissemination
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Thank You
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