Journal ArticleDOI
Global pattern of trends in streamflow and water availability in a changing climate
TLDR
This work shows that an ensemble of 12 climate models exhibits qualitative and statistically significant skill in simulating observed regional patterns of twentieth-century multidecadal changes in streamflow, and projects changes in sustainable water availability by the year 2050.Abstract:
Water availability on the continents is important for human health, economic activity, ecosystem function and geophysical processes. Because the saturation vapour pressure of water in air is highly sensitive to temperature, perturbations in the global water cycle are expected to accompany climate warming. Regional patterns of warming-induced changes in surface hydroclimate are complex and less certain than those in temperature, however, with both regional increases and decreases expected in precipitation and runoff. Here we show that an ensemble of 12 climate models exhibits qualitative and statistically significant skill in simulating observed regional patterns of twentieth-century multidecadal changes in streamflow. These models project 10-40% increases in runoff in eastern equatorial Africa, the La Plata basin and high-latitude North America and Eurasia, and 10-30% decreases in runoff in southern Africa, southern Europe, the Middle East and mid-latitude western North America by the year 2050. Such changes in sustainable water availability would have considerable regional-scale consequences for economies as well as ecosystems.read more
Citations
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Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
TL;DR: Drafting Authors: Neil Adger, Pramod Aggarwal, Shardul Agrawala, Joseph Alcamo, Abdelkader Allali, Oleg Anisimov, Nigel Arnell, Michel Boko, Osvaldo Canziani, Timothy Carter, Gino Casassa, Ulisses Confalonieri, Rex Victor Cruz, Edmundo de Alba Alcaraz, William Easterling, Christopher Field, Andreas Fischlin, Blair Fitzharris.
Journal ArticleDOI
Stationarity Is Dead: Whither Water Management?
Paul C.D. Milly,Julio L. Betancourt,Malin Falkenmark,Robert M. Hirsch,Dennis P. Lettenmaier,Ronald J. Stouffer +5 more
TL;DR: Climate change undermines a basic assumption that historically has facilitated management of water supplies, demands, and risks and threatens to derail efforts to conserve and manage water resources.
Book
Climate change and water.
TL;DR: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Technical Paper Climate Change and Water draws together and evaluates the information in IPCC Assessment and Special Reports concerning the impacts of climate change on hydrological processes and regimes, and on freshwater resources.
Journal ArticleDOI
Global Hydrological Cycles and World Water Resources
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the flow of water in natural and artificial reservoirs and reduce the vulnerability of people living under water stress to seasonal patterns and increasing probability of extreme events.
Global hydrological cycles and world water resources
TL;DR: Climate change is expected to accelerate water cycles and thereby increase the available RFWR, which would slow down the increase of people living under water stress; however, changes in seasonal patterns and increasing probability of extreme events may offset this effect.
References
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Book
Time Series: Theory and Methods
TL;DR: In this article, the mean and autocovariance functions of ARIMA models are estimated for multivariate time series and state-space models, and the spectral representation of the spectrum of a Stationary Process is inferred.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Version 2 Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) Monthly Precipitation Analysis (1979-Present)
Robert F. Adler,George J. Huffman,Alfred T. C. Chang,Ralph Ferraro,Pingping Xie,John E. Janowiak,B. Rudolf,Udo Schneider,Scott Curtis,David T. Bolvin,Arnold Gruber,Joel Susskind,P. A. Arkin,Eric Nelkin +13 more
TL;DR: The Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) version 2 Monthly Precise Analysis as discussed by the authors is a merged analysis that incorporates precipitation estimates from low-orbit satellite microwave data, geosynchronous-orbit-satellite infrared data, and rain gauge observations.
Journal ArticleDOI
Constraints on future changes in climate and the hydrologic cycle
Myles R. Allen,William Ingram +1 more
TL;DR: It will be substantially harder to quantify the range of possible changes in the hydrologic cycle than in global-mean temperature, both because the observations are less complete and because the physical constraints are weaker.
Journal ArticleDOI
High-resolution fields of global runoff combining observed river discharge and simulated water balances
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors demonstrate the potential of combining observed river discharge information with climate-driven water balance model (WBM) outputs to develop composite runoff fields, which simultaneously reflect the numerical accuracy of the discharge measurements and preserve the spatial and temporal distribution of simulated runoff.
Journal ArticleDOI
Global system of rivers: Its role in organizing continental land mass and defining land-to-ocean linkages
TL;DR: In this article, the spatial organization of the Earth's land mass is analyzed using a simulated topological network (STN-30p) representing potential flow pathways across the entire nonglacierized surface of the globe at 30-min (longitude × latitude) spatial resolution.