21st century water management: Calculating with the unknown

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Model-projected percentage change (2041-2060 vs. 1900-1970) in mean annual runoff volume for ice-free land under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change SRES A1B scenario. Credit: Science Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Model-projected percentage change (2041-2060 vs. 1900-1970) in mean annual runoff volume for ice-free land, under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "SRES A1B" scenario. Credit: Science, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Climate change is making a central assumption of water management obsolete: Water-resource risk assessment and planning are currently based on the notion that factors such as precipitation and streamflow fluctuate within an unchanging envelope of variability. But anthropogenic change of Earth’s climate is altering the means and extremes of these factors so that this paradigm of stationarity no longer applies, researchers report in the latest issue of Science.


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