The effects of climate change on global water scarcity may have been underestimated until now. Hydrologists from the Vienna University of Technology (TU) have examined measurement data from more than 9,500 hydrological basins around the world and found that the river systems respond more sensitively to changes than previously thought.
The widespread team around
Hydrologists Günter Blöschl and Yongqiang Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences collected measurement data on water discharge from all parts of the world. The aim was to compare this information with data on precipitation, solar radiation and other meteorological factors over a large area. This has never been done before, explains Bloeschl.
“What is new is that you don’t just use a certain model to calculate how much runoff there will be by the end of this century. We are questioning the measurements ourselves,” says the scientist from the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Technical Hydrology. Vienna University of Technology.In physical-based climate models, on which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is also based, conclusions are drawn directly from rainfall to runoff amounts.However, there are many influencing factors between these two points.
“Future water crisis could be serious”
Simply assuming a value for all regions does not work, as the storage capacity of the soil or the local vegetation has a strong influence on the balance. Based on their extensive data on what caused regional changes in the past, the scientists now make predictions up to the year 2050. It turned out that there is less water available in rivers on average than the climate models predict. It can be concluded that many systems react much more sensitively to changes than assumed. “Our estimate indicates the possibility that a future water crisis could be more severe than expected,” the team writes in the paper.
Water crises threaten North America, Asia, Africa and Australia
Although the new findings for Europe paint a picture that hardly changes from previous forecasts, the probability of water crises, especially in North America, parts of Asia, Africa and Australia, has so far been underestimated: the deviations average about ten percentage points. So if the IPCC predicts a minus of about ten percent in discharges for a region, according to the new analyzes that is more than 20 percent, to put it very simply. “It hurts a lot more then,” emphasized Bloeschl. For Europe, the current study also shows the often predicted decrease in available water in the Mediterranean. “The Mediterranean region is generally a hot spot,” says Bloeschl.
Increasing evaporation is a problem in Austria
In Austria, the amount of precipitation in the total annual balance is unlikely to change that much – even if there are shifts between seasons, such as slightly less rain in the summer. However, the most important factor for water availability is the further increase in evaporation, especially in the flat areas of eastern and southeastern Austria due to the increase in temperature and solar radiation. In the past 50 years alone, measured evaporation has increased nationally by 17 percent. This annual shortage is equivalent to all the water consumed annually by people worldwide.
Source: Krone

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