A Global Water Resources Assessment under RCP, SSP, and CMIP5 Scenarios
Abstract
A number of reports have been published on climate change impact assessment on global water resources, but earlier studies need to be updated and refined due to three reasons. First, most of earlier studies were based on an old set of IPCC scenarios consists of SRES (green house gas (GHG) emission and socio-economic scenarios) and CMIP3 (climate scenarios consistent with SRES). A new set of IPCC scenarios is being released (Moss et al., 2008) that consists of RCP (GHG emission scenario), SSP (socio-economic scenario), and CMIP5 (climate scenarios consistent with RCP). In order to take the latest achievements in climate modeling, impact assessments should be based on the new scenario. Second, most of earlier studies focused more on the change in water availability (e.g. runoff and discharge), less for change in water use (agricultural, industrial, domestic water use). Because SSP consists of five scenarios delineating substantially different world, water use scenarios should be developed with care reflecting the difference among them. Third, most of earlier studies assessed water availability and use at annual time resolution. This may overlook seasonal and inter-annual shortage of water due to variability in water availability and use. Here we present a novel assessment on global water resources using a global water resources model called H08 (Hanasaki et al., 2008a,b; 2010). H08 simulates natural water cycle and major human activities, such as water withdrawals and reservoir operation. It estimates water availability and use at daily time interval, which enables to take sub-annual water shortage into account. We first developed water use scenarios for agricultural (irrigation), industrial, and domestic water withdrawal that are consistent with five SSP scenarios. Next, we set up a matrix of scenario combination of RCP, SSP, and CMIP5 for insightful global water resources assessment. Finally we conducted H08 simulation using these scenarios and assessed water stressed region, including analysis on seasonal and inter-annual shortage of water due to variability in water availability and use. The results and implication are discussed in our presentation.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFMGC41B0977H
- Keywords:
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- 1630 GLOBAL CHANGE / Impacts of global change;
- 1803 HYDROLOGY / Anthropogenic effects;
- 1836 HYDROLOGY / Hydrological cycles and budgets