Since early work on the assessment of global, continental and regional-scale water balance components, many studies use different approaches including global models, remote sensing, observation data or combination of these. They attempted to estimate the amount of water that evapotranspires, runs-off into the Ocean or is retained in water storages on the terrestrial part of the Earth. However, previous estimates in literature e.g. on global scale river discharge differ largely due to the methodology and datasets used for calculation such that a robust assessment of the global and continental water balance components is challenging both in a historical period and future projections. This session is seeking for contributions that are focusing on the
i) assessment of global, continental and regional scale water balance components, such as precipitation, river discharge to the oceans (and/or inland sinks), evapo(transpi)ration, groundwater recharge, water use, change in water storage from the land and / or Ocean part of the Earth,
ii) presenting innovative approaches of such assessments,
iii) presenting the uncertainty of estimated water balance components.
We encourage submissions using different methodological approaches, such as (but not limited to) observation data driven analyses, global scale hydrological and land surface models (GHMs, LSMs), integrated atmosphere, Ocean-Land modeling (Earth System Models), remote-sensing approaches, isotope analyses, thermodynamic borders and meteorological/climate approaches such as energy balance driven water balance. Contributions could focus on any of the water balance components or in an integrative manner, for either Land, Ocean or both. Assessments of uncertainty of water balance components are highly welcome. In dependence of the (number and focus of) contributions, it is planned to write a review paper regarding this topic jointly with the contributing authors.