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9. New methods must be developed to address water system vulnerability, particularly
to extremes. Quantification of the uncertainty in each of the elements of the global
water-balance, including the managed aspects, in a consistent manner is required.
Further, there is a need to communicate uncertainties, manage expectations, address
the needs of water management under uncertainty (e.g., building resilience).
10. Several other developments in modeling are progressing and advances appear likely.
These include development of improved precipitation downscaling methods,
particularly for mountainous and arid regions; evaluation of the hydrological
dynamics of land surface models with newly available data; prediction of stream
temperature as a diagnostic tool in land surface models; improving freshwater fluxes
to the world's seas and oceans; and including the known climate feedbacks in off-line
land surface change assessments. Water demand models and assessments to land
surface and hydrological models must be linked at the global scale.
11. Demonstration of the usefulness of GEWEX, and Global Climate Observing System
(GCOS) and WCRP coordinated data products is required along with new tools and
provision of derived information for water resources management. The new tools
include cross-scale modeling, ensemble hydrological prediction, data assimilation,
and data analysis and visualization.
There are multiple benefits, and the results are critically important for society.In
addition to greatly improved knowledge about land water resources and ocean salinity, and
the causes of their variations, much improved models will allow better predictions of the
variability and change on all time scales from seasonal to centennial and from global to
continental to basin scales. Predictions with quantified uncertainties provide invaluable
information for water managers and users, including decision makers at many levels
associated with food and water security. These developments would naturally serve to push
WCRP research and development priorities, as users provide feedback on weaknesses and
further needs for information.
The information provided also feeds into the development of a ''Global Drought
Information System''. Such a system would provide a user anywhere in the world access to
information on our current understanding of drought in that region (e.g., role of ENSO,
Pacific Decadal Oscillation, global warming, etc.), the history of drought in that region
(with access to various data, time series, indices, etc.), current conditions (monitoring
results), the results of near real-time attribution (our understanding of the current condi-
tions) and regularly updated forecasts from months to years in advance (with consistent
estimates of uncertainties).
The system would naturally build on the various investments being made in observa-
tions (including reanalysis), drought research, and modeling and forecasting capabilities
(e.g., the various national and international multi-model ensemble (MME) efforts such as
the WMO lead center for long range forecasts: http://www.wmolc.org ). The system would
be built hand-in-hand with the user community and would have to be sustainable and
refreshable as new datasets, better understanding and better modeling capabilities become
available. It would naturally serve to push WCRP research and development priorities, as
users provide feedback on weaknesses and further needs (analogous to how the weather
community is continuously being pushed for better weather forecasts). These are the
envisioned products and information to be provided by the network of organizations and
centers through Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) and Future Earth (WMO
2011 ; Asrar et al. 2012a ).
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