How climate change will affect reservoirs and potential adaptation strategies

Climate change is strongly affecting lakes and reservoirs world-wide and climate modellers provide detailed information on different trajectories of future climates enfolding warming rates between ca. 2K (optimistic scenario RCP2.6) and 6K (pessimistic scenario RCP8.5) until 2100. Although these predictions provide insights into future conditions it is often difficult for practitioners to translate this climate information into applicable knowledge for their management. This is also true for reservoir man-agers who have to balance many different aspects at the same time (e.g. reservoir purpose, local specialities or technical speci-fications). Appropriate impact model tools therefore require to acount for local features and require rigorous validation and un-certainty assessment. We demonstrate such a translation pro-cess by linking impact models (reservoir model CEQUAL & catchment model mHM) to climate forecasts for Germany's larg-est drinking water reservoir (Rappbode reservoir) in order to identify problem atic developments and potential solutions.