Estimates of water availability and flooding risks remain one of the central scientific and societal challenges of the 21st century. The complexity of this challenge arises particularly from transient boundary conditions: 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. Also the feedbacks between the interlinked terrestrial and atmospheric processes on different spatial and temporal scales are still poorly understood.
This session therefore invites contributions addressing past, present and prospective changes in regional hydrological behaviour due to either (or joint) climate- and/or land use changes. This comprises particularly
- dynamical or statistical downscaling of global climate scenarios for hydrological impact analysis
- spatio-temporal detection of land use changes, particularly by remote sensing approaches
- quantification of regional land use change predictions and impact of past, present and future land use changes on water and energy fluxes in meso- to large-scale catchments
- joint or coupled modelling of water and energy fluxes between the atmosphere and the land surface/subsurface and analyses of feedback mechanisms
- climate change/land use change signal separation techniques and 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
- case studies of regional hydrological behaviour in climate sensitive and flood or drought prone regions worldwide.