Changes in Water Resources Systems:
Methodologies to Maintain Water Security and Ensure Integrated Management
(Proceedings of Symposium HS3006 at IUGG2007, Perugia, July 2007). IAHS Publ. 315, 2007., 62-70
Future
change of world water resources under SRES climate warming scenarios: A
multi-model analysis
YANJUN SHEN1, 2, TAIKAN OKI2 & SHINJIRO KANAE2
1 Center for Agricultural Resources Research, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shijiazhuang 050021, China
yjshen@sjziam.ac.cn
2 Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo 153-8505, Japan
Abstract Projections of the changes in water resources due to climate warming are critical for assessing the potential impacts of climate warming on human and natural systems. We analyse the potential changes in world water resources at annual and monthly scales by multi-model analysis using an ensemble of six General Circulation Models (GCMs), that forecast the future climate change based on a number of climate warming scenarios, which are presented in the Special Report on Emission Scenatios, (SRES). The discrepancies among GCMs are large; in some regions the change predicted by different GCMs are completely opposite. We screened the regions with high forecast consistency among the GCMs and categorized them into increasing, no change, and decreasing in annual runoff change through the multi-model analysis. Further detailed analyses on the monthly change are conducted in seven selected typical basins, which represent the different regions in annual change directions. The characteristics and possible causes for the changes in different basins are also discussed.
Key
words future
water resources change; global warming; IPCC; monthly; multi-model analysis;
SRES