The AGEOCE Explorer for Climate Change Impact on Water Resources is a web application providing information on potential future changes in water resources. It is developed by AGEOCE with the collaboration of the Goethe University of Frankfurt.
This explorer applies to all land areas of the globe except Greenland and Antarctica, based on a state-of-the-art multi-model ensemble (MME) of global hydrological models that was generated using the ISIMIP3b protocol (Gosling et al. 2024). It is particularly suited for supporting local climate change adaptation processes by visualizing, for selected grid cells, the range of potential future changes in water resources, taking into account the uncertainty of future greenhouse gas emissions and the uncertainty of climate and hydrological models.
Last update: 2025-01-31
This Explorer results from a joint R&D project between AGEOCE and the Goethe University of Frankfurt. When using this explorer, please include the following citation:
Attard, G., Müller, L., Bardonnet, J., Kneier, F., Döll, P. (2025) Explorer for Climate Change Impact on Water Resources, Version 1.0, available from https://ageoce.com/en/apps/climate-change-water, AGEOCE.
The web application visualizes potential future changes in water resources under three greenhouse gas emissions scenarios: low emissions (SSP1-RCP2.6), high emissions (SSP3-RCP7.0), and very high emissions (SSP5-RCP8.5). For more information regarding representative concentration pathways, the reader may refer to this article.
For the reference period (1985–2014), the impact of temporally varying water use and artificial reservoirs is considered. However, in simulations for 2015–2100, direct human impacts on water resources and land cover are held constant at 2015 levels. This ensures that changes between the reference and future periods reflect climate change impacts only (see Table 2.3 of ISIMIP3b Protocol).
The application presents changes in three key variables across 0.5° x 0.5° grid cells (~55 km x 55 km at the equator):
For each grid cell, the projected relative changes in these variables, computed by up to 20 multi-model ensemble (MME) members, are visualized. The MME was generated by driving four global hydrological models with bias-adjusted outputs from five global climate models. To avoid large relative changes arising from very small absolute values, an MME member is excluded from the MME if its variable value for the reference period is smaller than 5 mm/year for the yearly analysis and 1 mm/season for the seasonal analysis.
Model output data were downloaded from the ISIMIP repository. For the reference period 1985-2014, the experiments with the specifier “historical_histsoc_default” were selected, for the period 2015-2100 the experiments with the specifiers “ssp12670_2015soc-from-histsoc_default”, “ssp370_2015soc-from-histsoc_default” and “ssp585_2015soc-from-histsoc_default” (https://www.isimip.org/outputdata/).
The list of global hydrological models included in the MME reads as follows: jules-es-vn6p3, miroc-integ-land, cwatm, watergap2-2e.
Each model was driven by the bias-adjusted output of five different global climate models: mpi-esm1-2-hr, ukesm1-0-ll, mri-esm2-0, gfdl-esm4, ipsl-cm6a-lr.