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the Arctic, can currently not be achieved based solely on a reconciliation of
observations and projections. When taking different data and system/change perspec-
tives as starting points, different conclusions about what constitutes rational monitoring
priorities, and related strategies, arise.
•
Hitherto observed deviations in precipitation do not translate into similar deviations in
discharge even over the large scales of the 13 studied basins. The discrepancy between
precipitation and discharge deviations, and the fact that this discrepancy principally is
expressed as excess in discharge compared to available precipitation, indicates that a
component of the discharge variation may be due to changes in permafrost or
groundwater storage. Potentially, these storage changes may also be a factor in the
general deviations between observations and GCM simulations noted above.
•
Even though the increase in river inflow to the Arctic Ocean during 1993-2006 is small
in relative terms compared to the average flow for 1961-1992, in absolute terms it is of
the same order of magnitude as the meltwater increase from glaciers. As the river flow
changes are independent of the glacier contributions studied here, this underlines the
importance of also accounting for river discharge changes as a potentially contributing
source for sea-level rise and Arctic Ocean freshening.
•
There is a lack of long-term and accessible water chemistry data for large parts of the
PADB, and discharge data are also limited for considerable areas. The data that are
accessible do not constitute a representative sample of the whole PADB environment.
Acknowledgments The research in this paper has been funded through grants from the Swedish research
council Formas (Project Number 2007-1263) and the Swedish Research Council (VR; Project Number
2007-8393), and has been linked to the Bolin Centre for Climate Research (in turn supported by VR and
Formas through a Linnaeus grant) and the strategic research project EkoKlim at Stockholm University. The
study was inspired by and written for the documentation of the ISSI conference on The Earth's hydrological
cycle, Bern, Switzerland, February 6-10, 2012.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the
source are credited.
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