Future Flows and Groundwater Levels: British projections for the 21st century

A new assessment of the impact of climate change on river flows and groundwater levels across England, Wales and Scotland has been published by the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) and the NERC British Geological Survey. The Future Flows and Groundwater Levels project (FFGWL) has produced unique datasets, which are now available via the CEH website, through the CEH Information Gateway and downloadable from the National River Flow Archive and the National Groundwater Archive. Climate change is expected to increase temperatures and change rainfall across England, Scotland and Wales. In turn, this could modify patterns of river flow and groundwater recharge, affecting the availability of water and changing the aquatic environment. Although there have been many studies of the impact of climate change on river flows in different parts of the UK, coverage has been uneven and methods have varied. This has meant that previously it has been very difficult to compare between different locations and hard to identify appropriate adaptation responses. Scientists working on the Future Flows and Groundwater Levels project spent two years carrying out a consistent assessment of the impacts of climate change in Great Britain using the latest climate projections from the UK Climate Impact Programme, including the UKCP09 probabilistic climate projections. The products arising from the project will be used in developing climate change adaptation policy, studying the impact of climate change on water availability, improving river basin management, and evaluating the impact of climate change on aquatic ecology. They have already been used in the Environment Agency's "Case for change - current and future water availability" document that underpinned the Defra Water White Paper, published in December 2011. The main outputs from the project are two unique datasets (Future Flows Climate and Future Flows Hydrology) covering Great Britain, both made available to the public under specific licensing conditions and referenced by a Digital Object identifier (DOI). They represent a nationally consistent ensemble of 11 plausible realisations (all equally likely) in river flow and groundwater regime of nearly 150 years. They enable investigation, nationally, of the role of climate variability on river flow and groundwater levels and how this may change in the future. Some climate change uncertainty is accounted for by considering all ensemble members together. Future Flows Climate: an 11-member ensemble 1km gridded projecton time-series (1950-2098) of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration for Great Britain specifically developed for hydrological and hydrogeological application based on the UKCP09 climate model ensemble HadRM3-PPE run under the Medium emission scenario SRES A1B. Future Flows Hydrology: an 11-member ensemble projection of 148 years (1951-2098) of daily river flow and monthly groundwater level time series for 282 river catchments and 24 boreholes in Great Britain using Future Flows Climate as forcing data. Project leader Dr Christel Prudhomme, of the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said, "This is the first time river flow and groundwater time series, together with their forcing climate data characterising climate variability and change from 1950 to 2098, have been made available to the public at the Great Britain scale. This makes possible water-related impact studies at all scales from local to national." http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news/news_archive/Future-Flows-Groundwater-Levels_2012_25.html