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  • 1
    Publication Date: 2015-02-11
    Description: Climate change is expected to modify rainfall, temperature and catchment hydrological responses across the world, and adapting to these water-related changes is a pressing challenge. This paper reviews the impact of anthropogenic climate change on water in the UK and looks at projections of future change. The natural variability of the UK climate makes change hard to detect; only historical increases in air temperature can be attributed to anthropogenic climate forcing, but over the last 50 years more winter rainfall has been falling in intense events. Future changes in rainfall and evapotranspiration could lead to changed flow regimes and impacts on water quality, aquatic ecosystems and water availability. Summer flows may decrease on average, but floods may become larger and more frequent. River and lake water quality may decline as a result of higher water temperatures, lower river flows and increased algal blooms in summer, and because of higher flows in the winter. In communicating this important work, researchers should pay particular attention to explaining confidence and uncertainty clearly. Much of the relevant research is either global or highly localized: decision-makers would benefit from more studies that address water and climate change at a spatial and temporal scale appropriate for the decisions they make.
    Print ISSN: 0309-1333
    Electronic ISSN: 1477-0296
    Topics: Geography
    Published by Sage
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  • 2
    Publication Date: 2015-02-11
    Description: There is a burgeoning international literature on hydro-climatic trend detection, motivated by the need to detect and interpret any emerging changes in river flows associated with anthropogenic climate change. The UK has a particularly strong evidence base in this area thanks to a well-developed monitoring programme and a wealth of studies published over the last 20 years. This paper reviews this research, with a view to assessing the evidence for climate change influences on UK river flow, including floods and droughts. This assessment is of international relevance given the scale of the research effort in the UK, a densely monitored and data-rich environment, but one with significant human disturbances to river flow regimes, as in many parts of the world. The review finds that changes can be detected in river flow regimes, some of which agree with future change projections, while others are in apparent contradiction. Observed changes generally cannot be attributed to climate change, largely due to the fact that river flow records are limited in length and the identification of short-term trends is confounded by natural variability. A UK ‘Benchmark’ network of near-natural catchments is an internationally significant example of an initiative to enable climate variability to be discerned from direct human disturbances (e.g. abstractions, dam construction). Generally, however, the problem of attribution has been tackled rather indirectly in the UK, as elsewhere, and more efforts are required to attribute change in a more rigorous manner.
    Print ISSN: 0309-1333
    Electronic ISSN: 1477-0296
    Topics: Geography
    Published by Sage
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  • 3
    Publication Date: 2017-08-11
    Description: A warming climate is expected to have an impact on the magnitude and timing of river floods; however, no consistent large-scale climate change signal in observed flood magnitudes has been identified so far. We analyzed the timing of river floods in Europe over the past five decades, using a pan-European database from 4262 observational hydrometric stations, and found clear patterns of change in flood timing. Warmer temperatures have led to earlier spring snowmelt floods throughout northeastern Europe; delayed winter storms associated with polar warming have led to later winter floods around the North Sea and some sectors of the Mediterranean coast; and earlier soil moisture maxima have led to earlier winter floods in western Europe. Our results highlight the existence of a clear climate signal in flood observations at the continental scale.
    Keywords: Geochemistry, Geophysics
    Print ISSN: 0036-8075
    Electronic ISSN: 1095-9203
    Topics: Biology , Chemistry and Pharmacology , Geosciences , Computer Science , Medicine , Natural Sciences in General , Physics
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  • 4
    Publication Date: 2012-06-12
    Print ISSN: 0029-1277
    Electronic ISSN: 2224-7955
    Topics: Architecture, Civil Engineering, Surveying
    Published by IWA Publishing
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  • 5
    Publication Date: 2018-03-01
    Print ISSN: 1748-9318
    Electronic ISSN: 1748-9326
    Topics: Energy, Environment Protection, Nuclear Power Engineering
    Published by Institute of Physics
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  • 6
    Publication Date: 2010-12-01
    Description: Streamflow observations from near-natural catchments are of paramount importance for detection and attribution studies, evaluation of large-scale model simulations, and assessment of water management, adaptation and policy options. This study investigates streamflow trends in a newly-assembled, consolidated dataset of near-natural streamflow records from 441 small catchments in 15 countries across Europe. The period 1962–2004 provided the best spatial coverage, but analyses were also carried out for longer time periods (with fewer stations), starting in 1932, 1942 and 1952. Trends were calculated by the slopes of the Kendall-Theil robust line for standardized annual and monthly streamflow, as well as for summer low flow magnitude and timing. A regionally coherent picture of annual streamflow trends emerged, with negative trends in southern and eastern regions, and generally positive trends elsewhere. Trends in monthly streamflow for 1962–2004 elucidated potential causes for these changes, as well as for changes in hydrological regimes across Europe. Positive trends were found in the winter months in most catchments. A marked shift towards negative trends was observed in April, gradually spreading across Europe to reach a maximum extent in August. Low flows have decreased in most regions where the lowest mean monthly flow occurs in summer, but vary for catchments which have flow minima in winter and secondary low flows in summer. The study largely confirms findings from national and regional scale trend analyses, but clearly adds to these by confirming that these tendencies are part of coherent patterns of change, which cover a much larger region. The broad, continental-scale patterns of change are mostly congruent with the hydrological responses expected from future climatic changes, as projected by climate models. The patterns observed could hence provide a valuable benchmark for a number of different studies and model simulations.
    Print ISSN: 1027-5606
    Electronic ISSN: 1607-7938
    Topics: Geography , Geosciences
    Published by Copernicus on behalf of European Geosciences Union.
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  • 7
    Publication Date: 2013-07-15
    Description: This study seeks to provide a long-term context for the growing number of trend analyses which have been applied to river flows in Europe. Most studies apply trend tests to fixed periods, in relatively short (generally 1960s–present) records. This study adopts an alternative "multi-temporal" approach, whereby trends are fitted to every possible combination of start and end years in a record. The method is applied to 132 catchments with long (1932–2004) hydrometric records from northern and central Europe, which were chosen as they are minimally anthropogenically influenced and have good quality data. The catchments are first clustered into five regions, which are broadly homogenous in terms of interdecadal variability of annual mean flow. The multi-temporal trend approach was then applied to regional time series of different hydrological indicators (annual, monthly and high and low flows). The results reveal that the magnitude and even direction of short-term trends are heavily influenced by interdecadal variability. Some short-term trends revealed in previous studies are shown to be unrepresentative of long-term change. For example, previous studies have identified post-1960 river flow decreases in southern and eastern Europe: in parts of eastern Europe, these trends are resilient to study period, extending back to the 1930s; in southern France, longer records show evidence of positive trends which reverse from the 1960s. Recent (post-1960) positive trends in northern Europe are also not present in longer records, due to decadal variations influenced by the North Atlantic Oscillation. The results provide a long-term reference for comparison with published and future studies. The multi-temporal approach advocated here is recommended for use in future trend assessments, to help contextualise short-term trends. Future work should also attempt to explain the decadal-scale variations that drive short-term trends, and thus develop more sophisticated methods for trend detection that take account of interdecadal variability and its drivers.
    Print ISSN: 1027-5606
    Electronic ISSN: 1607-7938
    Topics: Geography , Geosciences
    Published by Copernicus on behalf of European Geosciences Union.
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  • 8
    Publication Date: 2011-03-16
    Description: Droughts tend to evolve slowly and affect large areas simultaneously, which suggests that improved understanding of spatial coherence of drought would enable better mitigation of drought impacts through enhanced monitoring and forecasting strategies. This study employs an up-to-date dataset of over 500 river flow time series from 11 European countries, along with a gridded precipitation dataset, to examine the spatial coherence of drought in Europe using regional indicators of precipitation and streamflow deficit. The drought indicators were generated for 24 homogeneous regions and, for selected regions, historical drought characteristics were corroborated with previous work. The spatial coherence of drought characteristics was then examined at a European scale. Historical droughts generally have distinctive signatures in their spatio-temporal development, so there was limited scope for using the evolution of historical events to inform forecasting. Rather, relationships were explored in time series of drought indicators between regions. Correlations were generally low, but multivariate analyses revealed broad continental-scale patterns, which appear to be related to large-scale atmospheric circulation indices (in particular, the North Atlantic Oscillation and the East Atlantic-West Russia pattern). A novel methodology for forecasting was developed (and demonstrated with reference to the United Kingdom), which predicts 'drought from drought'-i.e. uses spatial coherence of drought to facilitate early warning of drought in a target region, from drought which is developing elsewhere in Europe. Whilst the skill of the methodology is relatively modest at present, this approach presents a potential new avenue for forecasting, which offers significant advantages in that it allows prediction for all seasons, and also shows some potential for forecasting the termination of drought conditions. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
    Print ISSN: 0885-6087
    Electronic ISSN: 1099-1085
    Topics: Architecture, Civil Engineering, Surveying , Geography
    Published by Wiley
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  • 9
    Publication Date: 2015-05-20
    Description: The English Lowlands is a relatively dry, densely populated region in the south-east of the UK in which water is used intensively. Consequently, parts of the region are water-stressed and face growing water resource pressures. The region is heavily dependent on groundwater and particularly vulnerable to long, multi-annual droughts primarily associated with dry winters. Despite this vulnerability, the atmospheric drivers of multi-annual droughts in the region are poorly understood, an obstacle to developing appropriate drought management strategies, including monitoring and early warning systems. To advance our understanding, we assess known key climate drivers in the winter half-year (October–March) and their likely relationships with multi-annual droughts in the region. We characterise historic multi-annual drought episodes back to 1910 for the English Lowlands using various meteorological and hydrological data sets. Multi-annual droughts are identified using a gridded precipitation series for the entire region, and refined using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Standardized Streamflow Index (SSI) and Standardized Groundwater level Index (SGI) applied to regional-scale river flow and groundwater time series. We explore linkages between a range of potential climatic driving factors and precipitation, river flow and groundwater level indicators in the English Lowlands for the winter half-year. The drivers or forcings include El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic tripole sea surface temperature (SST) pattern, the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO), solar and volcanic forcing and the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO). As expected, no single driver convincingly explains the occurrence of any multi-annual drought in the historical record. However, we demonstrate, for the first time, an association between La Niña episodes and winter rainfall deficits in some major multi-annual drought episodes in the English Lowlands. We also show significant (albeit relatively weak) links between ENSO and drought indicators applied to river flow and groundwater levels. We also show that some of the other drivers listed above are likely to influence English Lowlands rainfall. We conclude by signposting a direction for this future research effort.
    Print ISSN: 1027-5606
    Electronic ISSN: 1607-7938
    Topics: Geography , Geosciences
    Published by Copernicus on behalf of European Geosciences Union.
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  • 10
    Publication Date: 2012-07-11
    Description: An overall appraisal of runoff changes at the European scale has been hindered by "white space" on maps of observed trends due to a paucity of readily-available streamflow data. This study tested whether this white space can be filled using estimates of trends derived from model simulations of European runoff. The simulations stem from an ensemble of eight global hydrological models that were forced with the same climate input for the period 1963–2000. The derived trends were validated for 293 grid cells across the European domain with observation-based trend estimates. The ensemble mean overall provided the best representation of trends in the observations. Maps of trends in annual runoff based on the ensemble mean demonstrated a pronounced continental dipole pattern of positive trends in western and northern Europe and negative trends in southern and parts of eastern Europe, which has not previously been demonstrated and discussed in comparable detail. Overall, positive trends in annual streamflow appear to reflect the marked wetting trends of the winter months, whereas negative annual trends result primarily from a widespread decrease in streamflow in spring and summer months, consistent with a decrease in summer low flow in large parts of Europe. High flow appears to have increased in rain-dominated hydrological regimes, whereas an inconsistent or decreasing signal was found in snow-dominated regimes. The different models agreed on the predominant continental-scale pattern of trends, but in some areas disagreed on the magnitude and even the direction of trends, particularly in transition zones between regions with increasing and decreasing runoff trends, in complex terrain with a high spatial variability, and in snow-dominated regimes. Model estimates appeared most reliable in reproducing observed trends in annual runoff, winter runoff, and 7-day high flow. Modelled trends in runoff during the summer months, spring (for snow influenced regions) and autumn, and trends in summer low flow were more variable – both among models and in the spatial patterns of agreement between models and the observations. The use of models to display changes in these hydrological characteristics should therefore be viewed with caution due to higher uncertainty.
    Print ISSN: 1027-5606
    Electronic ISSN: 1607-7938
    Topics: Geography , Geosciences
    Published by Copernicus on behalf of European Geosciences Union.
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