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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Hayley Fowler
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2025 Crown copyright and The Author(s). WIREs Climate Change published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. This article is published with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the King's Printer for Scotland. This article has been contributed to by U.S. Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA.Changes in “blue water”, which is the total supply of fresh water available for human extraction over land, are quite closely related to changes in runoff or equivalently precipitation minus evaporation, (Formula presented.). This article examines how climate change-driven recent past and future changes in the regional water cycle relate to blue water availability and changes in human blue water demand. Although at the largest scales theoretical and numerical model predictions are in broad agreement with observations, at continental scales and below models predict large ranges of possible future (Formula presented.) and runoff especially at the scale of individual river catchments and for shorter timescale subseasonal floods and droughts. Nevertheless, it is expected that the occurrence and severity of floods will increase and that of droughts may increase, possibly compounded by human-driven non-climatic changes such as changes in land use, dam water impoundment, irrigation and extraction of groundwater. Contemporary assessments predict that increases in 21st century human water extraction in many highly-populated regions are unlikely to be sustainable given projections of future (Formula presented.). To reduce uncertainty in future predictions, there is an urgent need to improve modeling of atmospheric, land surface and human processes and how these components are coupled. This should be supported by maintaining the observing network and expanding it to improve measurements of land surface, oceanic and atmospheric variables. This includes the development of satellite observations stable over multiple decades and suitable for building reanalysis datasets appropriate for model evaluation.
Author(s): Lambert FH, Allan RP, Behrangi A, Byrne MP, Ceppi P, Chadwick R, Durack PJ, Fosser G, Fowler HJ, Greve P, Lee T, Mutton H, O'Gorman PA, Osborne JM, Pendergrass AG, Reager JT, Stier P, Swann ALS, Todd A, Vicente-Serrano SM, Stephens GL
Publication type: Review
Publication status: Published
Journal: Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change
Year: 2025
Volume: 16
Issue: 2
Print publication date: 01/03/2025
Online publication date: 03/04/2025
Acceptance date: 12/03/2025
ISSN (print): 1757-7780
ISSN (electronic): 1757-7799
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Inc
URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.70005
DOI: 10.1002/wcc.70005
Data Access Statement: Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.
