Co-ordinators: Fulco Ludwig and Ronald Hutjes
This cluster brings together a unique group of hydrologist, meteorologists, biologists and agricultural scientist studying the relationships between climate (change), land use and water. By linking regional or climate model to impact models we study the feedbacks between land and the atmosphere and the impacts of climate change on water resources. A large part of our work is funded by the EU FP6&7 projects such as WATCH, Scenes, HighNoon and Combine. Another significant funding source are the Climate changes Spatial Planning and Knowledge for Climate programmes. Our work can be broadly divided into three different research themes.
Research Themes
Climate Change and Global Water Resources – Hesther Biemans, Michelle van Vliet, Fulco Ludwig, Ingjerd Haddeland and Wietse Franssen
Relations between climate change and water resources are studied by using and further developing the models VIC and LPJ. The main question of this research line is: What is the impact of climate change on the global and Regional water cycle and how does this affect global water resources such as water for food, industry (hydropower and cooling), and ecosystems. The aim the produce climate change impact and vulnerability scenarios which can be used to develop adaptation strategies
Land Use - Atmosphere Interactions: Herbert ter Maat, Obbe Tuinenburg, Wietse Franssen and Ronald Hutjes.
This research focuses on developing tools, especially the WAMS model, to study feedbacks between land and the atmosphere. The main question is how do changes in land use, such as, irrigation and urbanisation affect the regional climate and what the interactions are with the global climate systems.
Agricultural water use: Iwan Supit, Fulco Ludwig and Hesther Biemans
Agriculture – both irrigated and dry land – is the number one water user across the globe. Climate change will have a major impact on water used by agriculture and the availability of water for irrigation. The main research question is how does climate variability and change affect agricultural water use? For example, what is the impact of global warming on evaporation, transpiration and plant production.
Research Tools
The main research tools of the group are simulation models and remote sensing:
WAMMS – Wageningen Atmosphere Mesoscale Modelling System will serve in future projects as a framework for new initiatives in order to study feedback mechanisms between the land and the atmosphere across various scales in time and space. The basis of WAMMS is a regional atmospheric model (e.g. RAMS, WRF) to which necessary (sub)-models can be coupled in a dynamical setting. WAMMS consists at the moment of RAMS, SWAPS-C, LEAF-3 (both Land Surface Models), and VIC (Land Surface & Discharge Model). The simulations performed with this modelling system will have a spatial resolution ranging from 1 km – 50 km and a time resolution of ~10 seconds. WAMMS simulations will normally cover a week to a season (3-4 months) and an area of ~100-1000 km. The atmospheric model is 3-D, non-hydrostatic, based on fundamental equations of fluid dynamics and includes a terrain following vertical coordinate system. Together with its nesting options these allow it to be used in high resolution modes. The strength of one of the LSM in WAMMS (SWAPS-C), is that within the model above- and below-ground processes are represented in similar physical details.
LPJ – Originally LPJ (Lund Potsdam Jena) was developed as a Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) and is later extended with human land use, LPJmL (LPJ for managed Lands). LPJ is a dynamic global simulation model of vegetation biogeography and vegetation/soil biogeochemistry. Taking climate, soil and atmospheric information as input, it dynamically computes spatially explicit transient vegetation composition in terms of plant functional groups, and their associated carbon and water budgets. Within Wageningen UR the focus is on improving the hydrology and water resources part. LPJmL will be extended with a dam/reservoir module to study impact of climate change on water for irrigation. The grid size of LPJmL is 0.5 by 0.5 degree and runs at either a daily or a monthly time step. Simulations are usually done for multiple years up to a century.
VIC - VIC is a macroscale hydrologic model that solves full water and energy balances, originally developed by Xu Liang at the University of Washington. VIC is a research model and in its various forms it has been applied to regional watersheds and it can be applied globally. Within this cluster, VIC is applied globally and extended with a global dam module to study the impacts of climate change on water resources, in particular hydropower. In addition, VIC will be extended with a water temperature module to study the impact of climate change on stream flow temperatures and how this affects ecosystems and domestic and industrial water use. VIC can be used at different spatial scales. For Watch and WaterMIP VIC is run globally at 0.5*0.5 degree, but it also used for large basin studies in the Rhine, Congo and Ganges
Download a list of models (pdf).
Main Projects: