How will climate change affect the spatial coherence of streamflow and groundwater droughts in Great Britain?

Abstract

How climate change will affect the spatial coherence of droughts is a key question that water managers must answer in order to adopt strategies to mitigate impacts on water resources. Water transfers from regions with excess to those in deficit are fundamental to such strategies, but only possible if both regions are not simultaneously under drought conditions—these relationships could change in a warming world. Here, we use future simulations (under RCP8.5) of streamflow (186 catchments) and groundwater level (41 boreholes) from the Enhanced Future Flows and Groundwater (eFLaG) dataset to analyse the projected change in the spatial coherence of hydrological droughts at a national scale, with Great Britain as an example. Joint and conditional probabilities of two regions being in drought simultaneously are used to characterise the spatial coherence. The results are sensitive to various uncertainties, including the way drought is defined. However, some key findings emerge. In particular, for droughts defined based on current conditions, our results show that the spatial coherence of streamflow droughts for the ‘far future’ (2050–2089) is expected to increase during the summer everywhere in the country. During the winter, however, spatial coherence may only increase in the South-East, where the sharpest rise in winter droughts is likely to occur. The coherence between groundwater and streamflow droughts shows a more mixed picture, dependant on season and region. One important observation is that, in the South-East during the summer, the proportion of streamflow droughts that coincide with groundwater droughts is expected to decrease. These results provide a valuable insight for water managers to help inform their long-term strategy to overcome future impacts of droughts, including the feasibility of inter-region water transfers and conjunctive use (surface and groundwater) schemes. This flexible methodology has the potential to be applied in other parts of the world to help shape strategic regional and national investments to increase resilience to droughts.

Keywords

• drought
• climate change
• spatial coherence
• water resources
• inter-regional water transfer
• river flows