Climate Change Impacts on Irish River Flows: High Resolution Scenarios and Comparison with CORDEX and CMIP6 Ensembles

Abstract

Climate change is likely to impact water quality, resource availability and riverine ecosystems. While large ensembles are available to assess future impacts (e.g., the Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIP) and/or CORDEX) many countries have developed their own high-resolution ensembles. This poses a selection problem with robust adaptation dependent on plausible ranges of change being adequately quantified. Therefore, it is important to compare projected changes from available ensembles. Here we assess future climate change impacts for 26 Irish catchments. Using a high-resolution national ensemble of climate models projected impacts in mean, low and high flows are assessed and uncertainties in future projections related to catchment size. We then compare future impacts from CORDEX and CMIP6 ensembles for a subset of catchments. Results suggest increases in winter flows (-3.29 to 59.63%), with wide ranges of change simulated for summer (-59.18 to 31.23%), low (-49.30 to 22.37%) and flood (-19.31 to 116.34%) flows across catchments under RCP8.5 by the 2080s. These changes would challenge water management without adaptation. Smaller catchments tend to show the most extreme impacts and widest ranges of change in summer, low and flood flow changes. Both the ensemble mean and range of changes from the national ensemble were more modest and narrower than the CMIP6 and CORDEX ensembles, especially for summer mean and low flows, highlighting the importance of evaluating impacts across ensembles to ensure adaptation decisions are informed by plausible ranges of change.