FutureWater

Downscaling

Climate change is a fact. It is expected that these changes will be intensified as a result of human activities over the decades to come. The impact of these changes and the development of adaptation strategies are essential to establish sustainable water management practices for future generations.

Climate change projections

Scientific research has generated a much better understanding of climate processes and the development of climate change projections. These projections, however, are mainly developed for global scale climate patterns. Spatial scales are often in the range of hundreds of kilometers, with temporal resolutions of a month.

Methods

Sustainable water resources planning requires smaller scales of climate change projections. A couple of so-called downscaling methods are in use by FutureWater to tailor the global climate change projections to smaller scale levels.

FutureWater is also involved in some research projects to develop improved downscaling methodologies. Once completed these enhanced downscaling techniques will be applied to develop sustainable water management strategies.