Projections on future water availability and flooding risks is one of the central scientific and societal challenges of the 21st century. Increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations lead to global warming and an intensification of the water cycle and finally to shifts in the temporal and spatial distribution of precipitation and terrestrial water availability. Likewise, large scale land use changes impact and alter regional atmospheric circulation, thereby local precipitation characteristics and again terrestrial water availability.
This session invites contributions addressing future climate- and land use change induced changes in hydrological behaviour. This comprises particularly
- dynamical or statistical downscaling of global climate scenarios for hydrological impact analysis,
- spatio-temporal quantification of regional land use change predictions and impact of past, present and future land use changes on water and energy fluxes in mesoscale catchments
- requirements for catchment-scale hydrological models to reliably simulate future behavior
- joint or coupled modelling of water and energy fluxes between the atmosphere and the land surface/subsurface and analyses of feedback mechanisms
- quantification of future land use change vs. climate change induced hydrological change
- the adequate handling of climate change and land use change data and their uncertainty for the forcing of hydrological models.