Overriding aims of WATCH

By bringing together hydrologists, water cycle experts and climate modellers, WATCH will develop new methods to obtain the relevant information (means, extremes and uncertainties) from global datasets and climate model outputs.

The end product (threats to future water resources) will drive the combination of this new hydro-climatological approach of assessing floods and droughts in the 21st century with assessments of human and ecological water demands.

In order to maximise the work effort, six work areas or WorkBlocks exist in the project. These WorkBlocks do not operate independently, because of the mutually supporting work of the six groups. The 7th WorkBlock deals with the overall management, training and dissemination of the project.

Each WorkBlock has a list of specific milestones to ensure timely progress of the project occurs, and these are described below along with notes highlighting their relevance to policy makers:

Work Block 1: Global Water Cycle of the 20th Century
Aims to improve the representation of the water cycle for the past century in the current array of hydrological models.

Work Block 2: Population and Land Use Change
Aims to provide to the other workblocks with estimates of population land use and water requirements for the past (20th) and future (21st) Century

Work Block 3: Global Water Cycle of the 21st Century
Aims to produce projections of the terrestrial component of the global water cycle for the future (21st) Century. This will include uncertainty analysis

Work Block 4: Extremes: frequency, severity and scale
Aims to advance our understanding of extreme events including patters of drought and large-scale flood occurrences.

Work Block 5: Feedbacks between hydrology and climate
Aims to quantify feedbacks that are currently not sufficiently accounted for in climate models and are likely to impact on the water cycle components. These include (among others) impact and feedback of irrigation and changes in agricultural land cover on global and regional water cycle components

Work Block 6: Assessing the vulnerability of global water resources
Aims to evaluate the current vulnerability of water resources and related systems, and projecting future vulnerabilities in order to predict and prevent adverse changes.

Work Block 7: Management, training, communication and dissemination
Aims to maximise the benefits of this research to all stakeholders, ensure WATCH outputs are communicate to all key players (policymakers, researchers, education, water managers, citizens), and ensure WATCH research is well embedded in international collaborative science efforts.