Climate and Water: From Climate Models to Water Resources Management and Vice Versa

This article reviews the recent developments in the functional chain from climate models to climate scenarios, through hydrology all the way to water resources management, design and policy making. Although climate models, such as Global Circulation Models (GCMs) continue to evolve, their outputs remain crude and often even inappropriate to watershed-scale hydrological analyses. The bridging techniques are evolving, though. Many families of regionalization technologies are under progress in parallel. Perhaps the most important advances are in the field of regional weather patterns, such as ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation), NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) and many more. The gap from hydrology to water resources development is by far not that wide. The traditional and contemporary practices are well in place. In climate change studies, the bottleneck is not in this link itself but in the climatic input. The tendency seems to be towards integrated water resources assessments, where climate is only one among many changes that are expected to occur, such as demography, land cover and land use, economy, technologies, and so forth. In such a pragmatic setting a risk–analytic interpretation of those scenarios is often called for. The above-outlined continuum from climate to water is a topic where the physically based modelers, the empiricists and the pragmatists should not get restricted to their own way of thinking. The issues should develop hand in hand. Perhaps the greatest challenge is to incorporate and respect the pragmatic policy-related component to the two other branches. For this purpose, it is helpful to reverse the direction of thinking from time to time to start—instead of climate models—from practical needs and think how the climate scenarios and models help really in the difficult task of designing better water structures, outline better policies and formulate better operational rules in the water field.